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JEREMY
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QUANTIFICATION
TRIOLOGY
See Forever, 2018, HD video installation
 Brigid McCaffrey, Bad mama, who cares, 2016

Works by Steve Reinke, Oraib Toukan, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Filipa

César, Sophia Al-Maria, Trisha Baga, Ben Rivers + Ben Russell, Moyra
Davey, Lucy Raven, and more! Screenings and performances at The
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Visit imagesfestival.com for full schedule.

2
 N O

INTERVIEWS
6
PAUL SCHRADER
Deliberate Boredom in the
Church of Cinema
74 58
TV OR NOT TV
The Leftovers
BY KATE RENNEBOHM

61
BY ALEX ROSS PERRY DVD BONUS
Suzuki Seijun’s Taisho Trilogy
14 BY SEAN ROGERS
COMMUNITY/THEATRE
A Conversation with Stephen Cone 64
BY BLAKE WILLIAMS 36 GLOBAL DISCOVERIES ON DVD
THE MISTRESS OF SUSPENSE BY JONATHAN ROSENBAUM
22 Daphne du Maurier and Alfred
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO Hitchcock’s Rebecca 68
LIZZIE BORDEN? BY ALICIA FLETCHER CANADIANA
BY CHRISTOPH HUBER Robin Aubert’s Les afamés
39 BY LYDIA OGWANG
42 LET ENGLAND SHAKE
LET ART FLOURISH, Mick Jackson’s Threads and 80
LET THE WORLD PERISH the Imagination of Disaster EXPLODED VIEW
Morgan Fisher on Another Movie BY ADAM NAYMAN Bruce Conner’s Crossroads
BY JORDAN CRONK BY CHUCK STEPHENS

COLUMNS
FEATURES CURRENCY
5
10 EDITOR’S NOTE 70
“YOU NEVER HEARD OF CODE- VISAGES VILLAGES
SWITCHING, MOTHERFUCKER?” 47 BY ERIKA BALSOM
Joseph Kahn’s Bodied FILM/ART
BY STEVEN SHAVIRO Yto Barrada 72
BY JESSE CUMMING AVA
19 BY JOSH CABRITA
THE CHANGING VIEW OF MAN IN THE 50
PORTRAIT DEATHS OF CINEMA 74
Errol Morris’ Wormwood Paul Clipson THE WORK
BY LAWRENCE GARCIA BY MAX GOLDBERG BY MANUELA LAZIC

28 52 76
DO IT AGAIN FESTIVALS HIGH FANTASY
On Ricky D’Ambrose’s Words Sundance BY SIMRAN HANS
and Images BY ROBERT KOEHLER
BY PHIL COLDIRON 78
55 A FANTASTIC WOMAN
32 FESTIVALS BY ANGELO MUREDDA
IN MEASURED PRAISE Berlin
OF KAWASE NAOMI BY ADAM COOK
BY MICHAEL SICINSKI

PHOTO CREDITS: A24: 6, 9; Arrow Video: 61, 63; Austrian Film Museum: 22, 23, 24, 27; Berlinale: 28, 31, 55, 57, 76, 77; Celluloid Dreams: 32; Conner Family Trust: 80; Criterion
Collection: 36; Grasshopper Film: 73; HBO: 58; International Film Festival Rotterdam: 47; MK2: 35; Mongrel Media: 78, 79; Morgan Fisher: 42, 45, 46; Netflix: 19, 21; Renn Brown: Cover;
San Francisco Cinematheque: 50; Severin Films: 39, 41; Stephen Cone: 14, 17; Sundance Film Festival: 52; The Orchard: 74; TIFF: 68, 71; YouTube Red: 10, 13
 WARNING:
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EDITOR AND PUBLISHER
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ART DIRECTION AND DESIGN
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Cinema Scope ( ISSN 1488-7002 ) ( HST
866048978rt0001 ) is published quarterly by
Cinema Scope Publishing.Issue 74. Vol. 20, No. 1.
Spring 2018. No parts of this publication may be
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We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council
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We also acknowledge the support of the Ontario
Arts Council.
Editor’s Note
A 2017
gain, it is with little to no fanfare that we The
reveal the latest annual ye olde top ten list CINEMA SCOPE
TOP TEN
of films that premiered in festivals (eight),
theatrical release (one), or on Showtime (number
one) in the calendar year 2017. The only question
that occupies my mind about this mostly useless, 1
populist endeavour is whether David Lynch’s ca- TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN
reer-topper should be referred to as Twin Peaks: DAVID LYNCH
The Return or simply Twin Peaks; while the latter is 2
the title that appears in the opening credits of each WESTERN
episode, I’ve chosen to go with the former, because VALESKA GRISEBACH
that’s what we’ve been doing all along, and now is 3
not the time to admit defeat. ZAMA
As for the rest of the list, it should not be surpris- LUCRECIA MARTEL
ing when I point out that each of these films has 4
been covered in previous issues—or, in the case of ON THE BEACH AT NIGHT ALONE
First Reformed, due in North American cinemas in HONG SANGSOO
April after its festival run last year, featured in this 5
one—so really there’s nothing more to add, and I can PHANTOM THREAD
put all of this nonsense to rest. Though I must admit PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON
that I am upset that not one contributor took me up 6
on my earlier challenge to compile a ballot mostly GOOD TIME
consisting of Hong Sangsoo and Heinz Emigholz JOSH & BENNY SAFDIE
films. Hong and Heinz forever! 7
This year has already given us Grass and Two STREETSCAPES [DIALOGUE]
Basilicas, fine new films by these completely dif- HEINZ EMIGHOLZ
ferent filmmakers. Both premiered at the sprawl- 8
ing Berlinale, the festival that last year had the JEANNETTE,
good sense to premiere On the Beach at Night Alone L’ENFANCE DE JEANNE D’ARC
and the Streetscapes series. As always, along with BRUNO DUMONT
Sundance, Berlin is a welcome, if somewhat con- 9
fusing, start to the year-long “awards season,” by FIRST REFORMED
which I mean: why do all of these films exist, and PAUL SCHRADER
does anyone actually see them? Maybe not many 10
beyond the overly generous paying members of the PROTOTYPE
population of Berlin and its environs, who still turn BLAKE WILLIAMS
out in droves—and hence the problem with impos-
ing any meaningful changes on the festival, as other
------------------ S P E C I A L M E N T ION -----------------
less-generous locals are demanding.
Could the festival be smaller? Sure! But at the
risk of sounding like a broken record, all festivals EX LIBRIS:
could benefit from being smaller. (Most things THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
could, except for our readership.) But a tsunami of FREDERICK WISEMAN
crap is indicative of any mega-market festival, if not CALL ME BY YOUR NAME
a truism applicable to the entirety of the (cultural) LUCA GUADAGNINO
world proper; one needs to be one’s own curator, or THE DAY AFTER
at least a well-informed viewer, and make your way HONG SANGSOO
through the morass yourself. I guess that’s one of GOOD LUCK
the main reasons why we keep doing this magazine. BEN RUSSELL
Which is to say that maybe this top-ten stuf has ARABY
some value after all. AFFONSO UCHOA & JOAO DUMANS
 Paul Schrader
Deliberate Boredom in the Church of Cinema
BY ALEX ROSS PERRY

Paul Schrader’s First Reformed is his fourth film in five years, fol-
lowing the reinvention-spawning masterpiece The Canyons (2013),
the failed, compromised 2014 Nicolas Cage thriller Dying of the
Light (recently repurposed, remixed, and reclaimed as a new film
entitled Dark), and the gonzo, goofy Nicolas Cage thriller Dog Eat
Dog (2016). These previous films are representative of Schrader
progressing from the end of a financially supported, studio-
assisted working methodology into a cheaper, bolder, more liberated
one, and First Reformed is the apex of this new phase in what’s now
a nearly 50-year career. Schrader shows no signs of slowing down.
And how unlikely is that? Watching First Reformed, one sees a
theoretical thinker continuing to push the tools of his chosen medi-
um into unexplored places. Even more unlikely: First Reformed finds
the 71-year-old Schrader maturing into a sense of confidence and
patience with himself unseen for over two decades, perhaps since
Aliction (1997). But, with this film, he is, as always, up to something
new. Deliberately at odds with contemporary mainstream style,
pacing, and narrative clarity, First Reformed is a young man’s film,
made with a young man’s unbroken confidence and reckless sense
of “now or never.” Starring Ethan Hawke as a Calvinist Reverend
whose life becomes intertwined with that of Amanda Seyfried’s
grieving widow, the film is a slow, deliberate rumination on faith,
the fear of environmental collapse, self-doubt, and grief—all the
things an actual young man making this film would fail to capture
with any measure of authenticity.
Nothing would be easier for a filmmaker of Schrader’s age and
status than to throw up his hands and proclaim that the system
has moved away from him. Instead, he learns: he makes movies
quicker, cheaper, and with more furious intensity than any of his
peers. (Imagine De Palma making a movie as cheap and icky as The
Canyons. It would be sublime. It will never happen.) The only thing
that makes sense to Schrader is to continue to consume cinema
at a profound rate and to find new inspiration in new technology
within whatever infrastructure is possible at the given moment.
And yet, Schrader does this while simultaneously looking back-
wards: this year will see the publication of a new edition of his 1972
book Transcendental Style in Film along with a newly written es-
say-length introduction called “Rethinking Transcendental Style,”
the writing of which was, not coincidentally, done in tandem with
the conception of First Reformed. “Rethinking Transcendental

6
Style” concludes with the visual summation of Schrader’s ex-
amination of the modern landscape of Slow Cinema: a graph
of his own creation depicting a circle with an “N” in the centre,
representing narrative. The further away you get from the “N,”
the closer you come to passing through what Schrader terms the
“Tarkovsky Ring,” or the point at which commercial-leaning
slow cinema becomes less well suited for theatrical exhibition.
With First Reformed, Schrader has slowed the measure and
tempo of his filmmaking to a controlled, deliberate crawl while
forging ahead into familiar, yet unexplored, territory.
Cinema Scope: Talk about your relationship with slow cine-
ma and what drove you to finally make your “slow movie.”
Paul Schrader: There’s an enormous sense of satisfaction I
derive from First Reformed, because it pulls together threads
of what I’ve been thinking and doing for almost 50 years. The
first serious writing I did on film was about spiritual cinema,
Transcendental Style. That was in 1972. From that point on, I
became a screenwriter and director, and I never thought that I
would make that type of film. I like those films, but those films
are not for me. I was much more interested in action, empathy,
sexuality, violence, and these really aren’t in the transcendental
tool kit. So I went on and left that world behind. The first script I
wrote was Taxi Driver (1976). Now, 45 years later, I have made a
film that combines the thinking in that book with the narrative
drive of Taxi Driver. So I have my first philosophical book and
my first screenplay combined in this current film. That has been
very intimidating because it’s a little diicult to think of what to
do next. I hope that First Reformed is not my last film, but if it is,
it’s a very good last film.
Scope: By aesthetic design, First Reformed is inspired by a
certain type of cinema yet it is very much a contemporary film.
You could have decided that your way to make this style of film
was as a period piece. But you took a style and made something
startlingly modern.
Schrader: I’m not that much interested in history. I’m much
more interested in what people have on their minds at the mo-
ment. What is this peculiar place we’re living in, now? So it
would never have occurred to me to do a historical piece. That
said, the roots of First Reformed are in a series of films from
decades ago. It began three years ago when I had dinner with
Pawel Pawlikowski. We started talking about a certain kind of
spiritual film made at a certain budget level and how it’s now
possible to make films like this and be financially responsible in
a way that it wasn’t possible ten or 15 years ago. Certainly in this
country. I thought to myself, “You know, it’s time. You’ve been
saying for years that you’d never make a film like this. You’d nev-
er get caught skating on that Bressonian ice. But you’re going to
be 70. Now is the time.” By the time I reached home, my mind
was already engaged. And within a day or two or three, the sto-
ry line was starting to come together. You can spend two years
looking for an idea. But when it actually comes to you, then it
pulls together quite quickly. People will ask you, how long did it
take you to write this? And you say, “About ten years.” And then
the actual writing was about two weeks.
I looked at the models. You have the main character from
Journal d’un curé de campagne (1951). Then you have the setting
of Winter Light (1963). Then I decided on the ending from Ordet
(1955). I added a levitation scene from Tarkovsky, and then I
tied it all together with the glue of Taxi Driver. Look at the mod-
el of Winter Light: small empty church. A man going through
the motions meets a young couple. Max von Sydow is in despair
because of nuclear weapons. Well, shift that over. Take that
young couple and ask yourself, “What is the current despair?”
The current despair is environmental collapse. It’s more real in
a way, because nuclear weapons are kind of theoretical. It may
happen. Environmental collapse is not theoretical. It is happen-
ing and will happen. So that becomes the shift.
Scope: Do you feel comfortable approaching any idea from
this bouillabaisse perspective of looking at seven or eight touch-
stones? Whether you’ve intentionally put it in your films or not,
people have always said things like, “Hardcore (1979), that’s a
rif on The Searchers (1956).”
Schrader: Well, that’s what we all do. The one before this,
Dog Eat Dog, what I set out to do was ask how do you make a
crime film in 2016. After Scorsese, after Tarantino, after Guy
Ritchie, after Wayne Kramer. To answer that question, I went
through all these recent crime films and I started to get a sense
of how to pull a new film out of that bufet. What items you could
select and recombine to make this thing feel fresh again. And
that’s what all artists do, whether consciously or unconscious-
ly. Some people, like me, actually sit down and study, and make
notes and say this from there, this from there, this from there.
There is nothing new. Tell me one thing new.
Scope: There are a lot more contemporary crime films than
slow cinema, religious-exploration films.
Schrader: But the slow films are a lot longer!
Scope: You’ve mentioned all the forbearers. What contempo-
rary examples of slow cinema did you look at?
Schrader: The slowest of the slow, not much. There’s not much
I’m going to get from Wang Bing or Béla Tarr or Lav Diaz.
Scope: But you’ve watched their films?
Schrader: Oh yeah.
Scope: When I visited the set, you showed me on your phone a
nine-minute clip from Werckmeister Harmonies (2000). You had
it at the ready.
Schrader: Absolutely. But the ones that interested me most
were the ones that were still working in the commercial con-
text as opposed to the festival and museum context. I define
this with respect to Tarkovsky. As cinema moves away from
narrative, at some point it has to pass through the “Tarkovsky
Ring.” And once it passes through the Tarkovsky Ring, it leaves
the world of audiences and enters the world of museums and
festivals. So I was interested in films still inside the Tarkovsky
Ring, such as Silent Light (2007) by Reygadas, Stations of the
Cross (2014) by Dietrich Bruggemann, Pawlikowski’s Ida
(2013), obviously, Hadewijch (2009) by Bruno Dumont, Lourdes
(2009) by Jessica Hausner. Those are films that are still kind
of interested in playing to an audience. They’re not simply
museum artifacts.
7
 Scope: Which you consider some of the longer movies to be?
Schrader: Yeah. They’re installations. They’re like The Clock.
That’s made for museums. It’s not made for a theatre.
Scope: You’re focusing on films that play with these conven-
tions, do so roughly within a two-hour framework, and are for
all intents and purposes commercial films, albeit inaccessible to
the common audience. Films that play with those conventions
but do so without becoming something that is a badge of honour
to have actually watched.
Schrader: And also that have a legitimate shot at returning
their investment. That theoretically have a financial justifica-
tion. I made this film for $3.5 million.
Scope: Do you want that number in here?
Schrader: I don’t care. At $3.5 million, shot in 20 days, this
is a responsible act on my part as an artist. I’m not being irre-
sponsible. Maybe it’s because of my Calvinist upbringing, but
I’ve never felt comfortable being irresponsible. If you give me
a hundred dollars, I have to believe I can get you a hundred
dollars back.
Scope: How much does that financial responsibility impact
your approach to the story you want to tell? The filmmakers
you’ve mentioned are not American and working in a way that
$3.5 million is out of the question.
Schrader: Well, Kelly Reichardt works in this space too. I
don’t know what Kelly’s films cost, but I do believe they probably
brought back their investment. But this is what Pawel and I were
talking about. He had an ofer to do something in Hollywood,
and he decided to go back to Poland. He said that in Hollywood,
they give me ten or 15 million and tell me I’m free, but I’m not.
In Poland, they give me two million and I am free. So that’s what
I was thinking about. What’s the price point at which I am com-
fortable being free? Where I can look someone in the eye and
say, “Give me final cut, and you’ll get your money back.”
Scope: Thinking of the commercial concerns yet being in-
spired by filmmakers established in the canon but not estab-
lished in a commercial sense, is there a contemporary audi-
ence for films like First Reformed? Who is out there looking
for a two-hour-long slow movie? Or how do we teach people to
want that?
Schrader: That’s the Wild West of streaming. Virtually
everything we’ve learned about distribution doesn’t count an-
ymore. Every six weeks they change the rules. I’m caught in the
middle now of Babylon Berlin, which I think is the best thing
I’ve seen in years. It’s 16 episodes, so about 14 hours long. Better
than Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980). That’s a certain model.
Scope: People will sit at home and watch ten to 15 hours of
a deliberately paced TV show. Now, can you get them into the
theatre for a Tarkovsky-length film?
Schrader: That’s interesting. I’ve talking with A24 for the
release of this film, and I think that the definition of the film
and the discussion of the film should begin in the theatrical
context. The first people who see the film, the people who re-
view the film, should see it in a theatrical context. After that,
8
it no longer matters. But it should be defined by people who see
it in that way. Whereas for Dog Eat Dog, I didn’t give a damn if
people ever saw it in the theatre. It was never meant to be seen
in a theatre. The Canyons was never meant to be seen in a the-
atre. But for certain films, it’s good to start the discussion in a
hermetic environment.
Scope: It’s a creative choice for each movie. You don’t say, “It’s
2018, it’s over.” You say, “For this movie it matters, for that one
it doesn’t.”
Schrader: Yeah.
Scope: And fortunately you’ve already had that because of the
festival world. At any level, when we’re lucky enough to premiere
at festivals, the first responders have no choice. They are already
in the theatre. Right now, six months after your Venice, Telluride,
and Toronto premieres, the reputation is already building from
the hundred or so critics who saw it at those festivals.
Schrader: And it continues to build. I just came from
Rotterdam. So that’s the whole lead-up. The new gatekeepers
are the festivals. And with this massive volume of product, far
more than anyone can watch or even comprehend—there are
500 scripted TV series shooting as we speak—the real gatekeep-
ers are the festivals. If you make it through those gates, then
your head is above the crowd. It doesn’t mean you’ll be success-
ful, but at least people know you’re there.
Scope: This is where a lot of the filmmakers you refer to as
makers of modern slow cinema live and breathe. Lav Diaz wins
awards at major festivals, in competition with eight or nine-
hour movies.
Schrader: But he doesn’t play theatrically. And I don’t know
the financial understructure of his films. A lot of these slow cin-
emas from Third World countries are underwritten by funds.
There is a fund out of Rotterdam specifically for these kinds of
films. Often it’s a chance for relatively unknown cinema to make
a mark because they can get subsidized as a cultural product.
But there is no mechanism in America to subsidize art cinema.
(Schrader brings up the aforementioned graph on his phone)
Did I ever show you this graph I did for the new piece that I
wrote for the book? If you assume that film is inherently nar-
rative—that the moment you place one image next to another,
you’re creating a narrative—then as film flees from narrative in
the Deleuzian sense, it can flee in one of three directions, three
tendencies. One is the surveillance camera, another is toward
the art gallery, and the third is toward Mandala, the religious
experience. And then you can chart the directors who flee nar-
rative, and then you can chart the Tarkovsky Ring they pass
through. Everyone outside of it is outside of commercial cine-
ma. But every filmmaker on this graph is acting in some degree
against the narrative impulse. They’re all slowing it down.
Scope: These are all filmmakers that you’ve familiarized
yourself with?
Schrader: Yeah.
Scope: So outside of the ring, you have Béla Tarr, Lav Diaz,
Michael Snow, Tony Conrad, James Benning, Pedro Costa,
Lisandro Alonso, Albert Serra, Tsai Ming-liang, Ben Rivers.
This is all outside the realm of narrative?
Schrader: Outside the realm of commercial cinema.
Scope: Albert Serra made a Louis XIV biopic, which played in
theaters. Did you see that?
Schrader: I saw it at Cannes. I liked the perversity of it. I liked
the Rossellini of it all.
Scope: You’ve got Rossellini right here, very close to the
nucleus of narrative, next to Ozu, Dreyer, Ceylan, Bresson,
Dumont. Where would you place First Reformed on this?
Schrader: Definitely inside the ring.
Scope: Inside but closer to the Mandala?
Schrader: Closer to Rossellini I suppose.
Scope: How does your conversation with an actor fit in with
this idea of boredom and duration? You are asking them to sit
there for three, four, five minutes.
Schrader: Fortunately with Ethan, I had an actor who under-
stood. The first conversation I had with him, I said this is a “lean
back” performance. Sometimes you lean into the scene and
sometimes you lean away from it. You give the viewer less than
you can. And as soon as those words came out of my mouth, he
said, “I know exactly what you’re talking about.” Ethan is such
a renaissance man: film director, theatre director, author, play-
wright, composer, and actor. When you’re dealing with Ethan,
you’re dealing with someone who understands this completely.
Scope: How much do you want people to absorb this intellect?
Do you only need to give people two hours of the images that they
will respond to and performances that will sell these ideas, or is
there a way to create a dialogue between intellectual thinking
about film and a commercial movie starring movie stars?
Schrader: The big challenge of working on the slow side is
using boredom as an aesthetic tool. To give an example from
Bresson, one of the first people to do this: a man exits a room,
closes the door. Normally in a regular film, you lay the splice
as the door closes. Bresson waits one, two, three seconds on
the closed door. What’s happening then? Something is hap-
pening. It’s not nothing. You’re watching a closed door. In real
life you don’t watch a closed door when someone leaves. Your
eye moves somewhere else. But in a movie, he holds it on that
door. Now what if he holds it ten seconds on the door? What
happens? What if he holds it 30 seconds? What happens then?
Now you are involved with what Henri Bergson called duration.
La durée. What happens in the duration? What is your mind
doing? The filmmaker is now putting your mind to work. What
thoughts are you having in the duration? To what degree can
the filmmaker determine what thoughts you will have in the du-
ration? And so the delicate dance of slow cinema is to activate
the viewer during the duration to use boredom as an aesthet-
ic tool, but not drive the viewer out of the theatre. What hap-
pens when you’re bored? Well, when you’re bored you either
engage or you exit. And the trick is to engage the bored viewer.
How do you do that? Every slow filmmaker has a diferent lit-
tle formula to do that. It’s a contract not unlike church attend-
ance. No one walks out of church because they’re bored. They
go to church knowing they will be bored: they want to expe-
rience that quietness. So you go to certain movies and know
you’re going to be bored to some degree. And the filmmaker
can use that to take you some place else. But if he abuses that,
you will leave and you probably won’t ever come back to that
church again.
9
“You Never Heard
of Code-Switching,
Motherfucker?”
Joseph Kahn’s Bodied
BY STEVEN SHAVIRO Joseph Kahn did not much care for Damien Chazelle’s La La Land
(2016). When the movie opened, he unleashed a sarcastic Twitter
storm: “White people will love LA LA LAND…The dance numbers
in LA LA LAND feel like Verizon commercials…99% of the couples
in LA are interracial, except the one in LA LA LAND, and the white
couples at Cinerama Dome watching that white couple…LA LA
LAND is exactly like Los Angeles when I got there in 1995. White
people swing dancing around cofee shops…I have yet to meet one
black person who saw LA LA LAND who didn’t complain about
how wack the dancing and singing was.”
Kahn’s spectacular new movie Bodied (which was in post-
production when La La Land was released) can perhaps be thought
of as the anti-La La Land. For one thing, Bodied is raucously mul-
tiracial and multicultural—in sharp contrast to La La Land’s ge-
neric whiteness, and its presentation of Ryan Gosling as the white

10
custodian of a 60-year-old African-American art form (’50s cool
jazz) that black people themselves (in the person of John Legend)
are accused of having forgotten or debased. Bodied is about con-
temporary battle rap, rather than old-school jazz. From its point
of view, even LL Cool J is old news (early in the film, LL Cool J is
mentioned alongside Dostoyevsky by a university professor who is
clearly clueless about what’s happening now). Bodied entirely re-
jects the driving force of La La Land: its nostalgia, its longing for
a supposedly simpler and better time, and its lament for lost older
forms of cultural expression and authority. Kahn simply has no in-
terest in cultural idealization and recuperation. Bodied implicitly
follows Brecht’s maxim that we should not build on the good old
days, but on the bad new ones.
Bodied also bears comparison with La La Land because Kahn’s
film is something like a mutated musical. Indeed, Bodied pretty
much follows the rules of the genre, alternating between narrative
sequences and big production numbers. The only diference is that
in Bodied the musical performances are replaced by spoken-word
rap battles. Instead of singing, the rappers sling vicious rhymes at
one another. And instead of dancing, the rappers get physical: as
they spew their insults, they gesture, they bob around, and they
get up in each other’s faces. In Hollywood musicals, everything
builds to the big production numbers, which give intense expres-
sion to the characters’ experiences and emotions, but also work
as compelling spectacles in their own right. Everything in Bodied
similarly builds up to the thrilling set-piece rap battles, which are
held in bars and warehouses before cheering crowds.
It’s hard to take a form as overfamiliar and as heavily codified
as the musical and make it compelling to today’s jaded audiences.
Arguably, La La Land’s struggle with this diiculty is what that
film is really about. Kahn faces a similar problem with Bodied,
which is every bit as self-conscious as La La Land. Bodied is filled
with lines and performances that seem as if they were being de-
livered “in quotation marks,” thus to acknowledge their own de-
rivative status. Dare I say that both films are post-postmodern, or,
to use a term that comes from Kahn’s 2011 film Detention, steeped
in post-irony? The battle rappers in Bodied themselves complain
about the “corny jokes” and “cliché-ass lines” that they hear from
their opponents over and over again, and that they often also find
themselves compelled to use. But they have to accept this situa-
tion, because all that “expected shit” is “what the audience wants
to hear.” This is in fact a problem for all genre narratives—and
especially so in our current age of ubiquitous sampling and recy-
cling. Kahn’s own solution to this dilemma is the one suggested
within the movie by the rapper Devine Write (played by the won-
derful Shoniqua Shandai): “The fact that you can expect it means
you can flip it. Play it to your advantage.”
Indeed, Bodied flips all the conventions it uses. I have long felt
that, for all that he overloads his movies (and music videos) with
heightened, outrageous, and often controversial content, Joseph
Kahn is something of a secret formalist. His self-imposed formal
challenge in Bodied is how to make a kinetic and dynamic movie
from a screenplay that is word-heavy, largely composed of one-on-
one verbal exchanges. I have never seen a movie that does so much
with that old staple of narrative cinema, the basic shot-reverse-
shot setup. In Bodied, both rap battles and everyday interactions
(including phone calls and Skype chats as well as people talking
in the same physical space) are presented from surprising angles,
with sharp, frequent cuts between close-ups and longer shots,
as well as between speaker and addressee and spectators. These
sequences also feature flips of perspective (often by the deliber-
ate flouting of the 180-degree rule), confusions of address (when
trying to hold two conversations at the same time), expressionist
camera movements used as emotional punctuation, and textual
and sonic interpolations (words appearing on the screen, or voices
booming within a character’s head). All these devices are some-
times deployed for comedic efect; at other times, they underline
the rappers’ strategic moves during the battles; at still other times,
they work to amplify the stakes of everything the characters say
and do.
“Bodied” as a slang term means wiped out, utterly defeated
(equivalent to video gamers’ “pwned” or “owned”); but the movie
also suggests—through its editing and cinematography as much
as through its content—that speech acts are themselves fully
(em)bodied, exceedingly visceral and physical. We may tell chil-
dren that “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can
never harm me”; but Bodied reminds us that spoken words them-
selves are also physical actions, with great power, and great poten-
tial to harm. As one character puts it, “Battle rap is not boxing. It’s
a street fight. You won’t just get your jaw broke, you got someone
right in your face trying to tear you apart.” In this movie, words cut
and wound: not only because of the streams of racist, sexist, and
homophobic vituperation that are spewed out during the rap bat-
tles, but also due to the way that Kahn films verbal confrontations
as exciting action sequences.
This expressive amplification is the key to the movie’s defence
of unfettered free speech. The rap battles in Bodied are indeed
filled with aggressively vile language that will deeply ofend some
viewers, while giving a delicious, naughty thrill to others. And the
movie shows little patience for people who would just like to shut
this discourse down. Indeed, Kahn and his Toronto-born screen-
writer Alex Larsen (aka the battle rapper Kid Twist) have great
fun throughout the film ridiculing the speech-policing call-out
culture that we find today on elite college campuses, and in some
segments of the Left. No doubt, for many critics and viewers this
defence of free speech will be the movie’s biggest takeaway.
But things are a bit more complicated than that. The movie cer-
tainly mocks elitist college students who pontificate about “full
communism,” without ever questioning their own highly privi-
leged status. But whatever else it does, Bodied remains entirely
devoid of the retro resentment, the rage at the decline of white pa-
triarchal authority, that lies behind the most common attacks (by
mainstream media as well as the alt-right) on so-called “political
correctness.” Bodied doesn’t just seek to shock us with transgres-
sive speech; rather, it asks us to actively think about our reactions
to language that we find ofensive.
In other words, Bodied rejects censorship, but it still insists
that our choice of words matters. Battle rappers say so many nasty
11
things precisely because their fate hinges on their use of language.
The movie therefore ofers us a panoply of diferent responses,
none of them definitive, to the problem of transgressive speech.
One crucial suggestion comes from the African-American rapper
Behn Grymm (Jackie Long): “You never heard of code-switching,
motherfucker?” Behn points to the importance of using diferent
kinds of speech in diferent situations. He doesn’t speak to his
family at home in the way that he does to opponents in rap battles;
indeed, he keeps his private life entirely separate from his public
persona. Like many African-Americans, Behn fluently switch-
es between standard English and African-American Vernacular
English, depending on circumstances. For oppressed groups, such
code-switching has historically been crucial to their very surviv-
al. If you’re a slave, you can’t let the master know what you really
think, but you also can’t let the master’s language completely ef-
face your own. Code-switching remains a skill that people in posi-
tions of power might not need or even know about, but that others
are obliged to cultivate.
Meanwhile, Behn’s wife Jas (Candice Renee) notes that Behn’s
rapping makes money that helps support their family. Jas acerbi-
cally suggests that for white folks to protest against battle rap’s
negative language is frivolous at a time when her husband, or
any other black man in America, “no matter how much money he
makes, no matter how well he speaks, no matter how many suits he
puts on…could still go out and get shot in the street by the police
for no reason.”
Still another approach comes up in a rap battle between the
black woman rapper Devine Write and the Korean-American
rapper Prospek (played by Jonathan Park, who also appeared in
Detention). When they face of, each takes up the other’s lines,
much to the confusion of the spectators. Prospek unleashes a bar-
rage of slurs against Asians, and Devine replies with a misogynis-
tic rant. Their hope is that taking these phrases up and flipping
them, or putting them in an absurd context, may rob them of at
least some of their power. Banning ofensive speech merely gives
the forbidden words a hidden allure; and erasing certain words
doesn’t make the attitudes behind the words go away. We cannot
entirely escape, and we should not ignore, the racist and sexist
codes that are so prevalent in our society. It’s better to jam them,
mess with them, disrupt them.
Rap battles are intensely performative, which is why they are
filled with hyperbolic statements that might not be acceptable in
other situations. But, at the same time, these performances can-
not be walled of from the rest of life. Code-switching and code-
jamming only work up to a point. There’s no firm line separat-
ing merely symbolic confrontations from actual, literal ones.
Throughout the movie, each of these slips into the other. At sever-
al points, everyday conversations turn confrontational; the movie
responds by treating them as rap battles, with onscreen titles and
expressive camera work—even though there is no audience. In the
other direction, the berserk rapper Megaton (played by actual bat-
tle rapper Dizaster) has trouble keeping battles apart from the rest
of his life; a number of times, his verbal aggressions end with him
sucker-punching, or otherwise physically abusing, his opponent.
12
When he catches another rapper having sex with his girlfriend, he
first threatens his opponent with a shotgun, but then demands a
rap battle in order to resolve the beef.
Bodied also “flips it,” turning “the expected shit” of genre norms
inside out, through its treatment of plot and character. The movie
feeds us an all-too-familiar story, with an all-too-familiar protag-
onist, and then it pulls the rug from under us. Adam, the lead char-
acter of Bodied, is a young, naïve white guy who leaves his comfort
zone (his life as a graduate student at an elite university, where he
is writing a Master’s thesis on “the use of the n-word in battle rap”)
and enters into a dangerous and exotic realm (the actual, mostly
non-white world of battle rap). Adam starts out as a newbie, but he
soon finds a mentor in Behn Grymm, from whom he gains accept-
ance and learns valuable lessons. Ultimately, however, Adam out-
grows and surpasses his mentor—or, more precisely, betrays him.
After numerous diiculties and setbacks, Adam finally triumphs.
By the end of the movie, the people of the exotic realm (the battle
rappers) recognize that this white dude is better at what they do
than they themselves are. Even Megaton, who is Adam’s greatest
enemy, acknowledges as much.
This basic plot—the hero’s journey, the Joseph Campbell “mono-
myth”—is a staple of Hollywood filmmaking. You see it not only
in Star Wars (1977) and Avatar (2009), but (more relevantly to
Bodied) in such popular tales of the white underdog’s competitive
triumph as Rocky (1976) and 8 Mile (2002). But Bodied shits all
over the monomyth. As Kahn himself recently said on Twitter, “I
hate the Hollywood cliché that you have to like your protagonist.
No, you don’t.” The way this works is tricky. Bodied is set up so that
we go along with Adam’s journey, seeing everything that happens
from his perspective. This would normally lead us to “identify”
with him, and take his triumphs as our own. But at the same time
that the narrative arc exalts Adam as a hero, his character gets dis-
sected and discredited right before our eyes.
A lot of this is accomplished through brilliant acting. The char-
acter of Adam is played—in a superb coup of casting against type—
by Calum Worthy, previously known for his role as Dez, the goofy
best friend of the protagonist in the Disney children’s show Austin
and Ally. In Bodied, Worthy takes aspects of his Disney perso-
na—the innocuous baby face, the nerdy and slightly overwrought
enthusiasm, the wheedling bids for sympathy—and uses them as
a kind of mask. He turns the full force of his charm upon the audi-
ence, just as he does with his girlfriend Maya (Rory Uphold) and
his fellow graduate students. But he also shows us that there is a lot
of ugly stuf lurking behind this façade. Adam succeeds in battle
rap (and loses his girlfriend) by learning how to unleash his inner
bigot, projecting aggressive anger and malice, and spewing out the
most extreme slurs that he can imagine.
Worthy highlights all this with his carefully nuanced per-
formance. Over the course of the movie, we see a bit too much
of Adam’s self-congratulatory smirk. His perpetual gaucheness
comes to the forefront, in non-battle situations, with Behn and the
other (black, Latino, Asian, and Arab) members of his crew. Often,
when they are joking around with what they themselves know to be
stupid, ignorant stereotypes, Adam comes forth with something
so breathtakingly obtuse and tone-deaf as to stun them all into si-
lence. Adam is also unable to conceal his surprise when he learns
that Behn isn’t really a gangsta from the ’hood, but lives a solidly
middle-class life with his wife and daughter in “the safest neigh-
bourhood in Oakland.” In other words, Adam is a bit too prone to
believe his own clichés and racist assumptions. As Jas says with
considerable exasperation: “Damn it! I can’t believe I just had to
blacksplain some shit to you in my own damn house!” We gradu-
ally realize that Adam is devoid of empathy, and unable to grasp
anyone else’s point of view. All this undermines the narrative set-
up of the privileged white outsider as “our” surrogate for entering
into, and gradually learning to master, the exotic (i.e., largely non-
white) world of battle rap.
Adam tries to maintain his innocuous façade for himself, as
well as for others. He wants to believe that deep down he’s a good
person. No matter how vicious his bars in the rap battles are, he
keeps on telling everybody around him that he isn’t really a rac-
ist. “It’s battle rap,” he says, “anything goes in a battle, right?” But
over the course of the film, we are once again forced to recognize
that things aren’t so simple. Behn answers Adam that, “Yeah, an-
ything goes.” But then Behn goes on to ask him, “You think your
words ain’t got fucking consequences?” You can say anything in
a rap battle; but, since words are actions, you’ve got to own up to
whatever it is you say and accept the prospect of “everybody call-
ing you out on your shit.” This is what Adam remains unable to do,
which is why Behn’s final judgment on him is that he is “a degener-
ate scumbag.” The whole movie turns on the cognitive dissonance
between Adam’s singular accomplishment (his triumph in terms
of the heroic narrative) and his revealed character (which is rac-
ist in a way that is all too typical for white Americans). In Bodied,
as much as in Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017), the people you real-
ly need to watch out for are the white folks who swear that they
aren’t racist.
I think that Bodied, together with his earlier film Detention, es-
tablishes Joseph Kahn as one of the most important filmmakers
working in North America today. We live at a time when new tech-
nologies are reshaping all the aspects of life that used to be taken
for granted. Changing demographics mean that the US is more
vibrantly multicultural than ever before, yet the country remains
under the political control of white supremacists hell-bent on re-
venge. At least some people in Hollywood know that under such
conditions it’s no longer possible to make movies in the ways that
they used to. Films like La La Land deserve at least some credit
for trying to grapple with this situation. But Kahn faces our con-
temporary condition more boldly, and more imaginatively, than
nearly anyone else in the film industry seems capable of doing. He
knows how to both manage and scramble the codes. His movies do
not give us political solutions, but they are astonishing aesthetic
inventions, among the rare works that manage to be (as Lenin’s
saying goes) as radical as reality itself.
13
 Princess Cyd

Community/Theatre
A Conversation with Stephen Cone
BY BLAKE WILLIAMS

“What does it matter? All is grace.”

—Curé d’Ambricourt, Journal d’un
curé de campagne

Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party

14
The question in any cinema that aspires to be devotional is this:
where can we locate the spirit, the soul, the love? More specifi-
cally, where does grace become concrete? For Dreyer, it was in
the face; for Scorsese, in the individual’s conscience, in one’s
will to do good; and for Dorsky, in the medium itself—revealed
only by makers who acknowledge and remain sensitive to its
formal situation. For Chicago-based filmmaker Stephen Cone,
devotion—a religious observance of God, yes, but also the fer-
vour and allegiance we feel for other people—is a matter of com-
munity. It’s in the fact that we live amongst other beings, that we
share space with those who desire and believe diferent things
than we do, and that who we are—the essence of our being, of
our souls—is predominantly shaped by and inseparable from
the place (i.e., the community) that we come from.
Cone has expressed this sentiment—implicitly, explicit-
ly, religiously—throughout his filmography, which has, over
the last ten years, quietly produced eight exceedingly under-
recognized features (not to mention several dozen shorts, most
made between 2012 and 2016 in collaboration with students at
Acting Studio Chicago’s Cinema Lab). Which isn’t to say that his
movies are all doing or saying the same things. Despite a certain
consistency of themes and subjects—the psychology of repres-
sion, the blossoming and transience of passion, and the dignity
of ascetic living (all more or less observed from the perspectives
of young adults)—Cone finds fresh and distinct forms for each
universe he creates. Black Box (2013) observes the behind-the-
scenes angsts and flirtations of an undergrad theatre troupe as
they rehearse a stage adaptation of a cracked young adult novel,
while the even more Brechtian The Mystery of Life (2014) takes
on the scattered form of a found audition tape—the production’s
scenes crinkling at the seams, cut against each other at ran-
dom, while hints of an unnerving, veritably Lynchian narrative
bleed through.
Those two projects were abstractions and refractions of
Cone’s first festival hit, The Wise Kids (2011), which is also one of
the most realistic and wrenching representations of Protestant
America I have ever seen. Set amongst a community of Baptist
churchgoers in South Carolina, The Wise Kids casts its
Altmanian net over no less than 11 prominent characters, many
of which are involved in the church’s upcoming Christmas pag-
eant. In scene after scene, members of the local populace speak
over and around how they truly feel—shielding their desires
from ridicule—so that they can best perform the ideologically
conservative lifestyle that the South’s very architecture active-
ly promotes. A not dissimilar collection of individuals would be
featured a few years later in Cone’s incredibly sensual breakout
film, Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party (2015), in which progres-
sive impulses, id-saturated euphoria, and seething melodrama
cause a teen’s backyard pool party to practically implode under
the weight of its own rapture.
Unlike The Wise Kids, the stakes in Henry Gamble are fa-
tal, yet both films render each individual in their respective
spheres—regardless of how damaging their behaviours and
beliefs may be—with generosity and compassion. The latter
two traits perhaps best characterize Cone’s latest and most ac-
claimed film, Princess Cyd (2017), which ofers a take on youth,
sexuality, and community that’s unique to both his cinema and
cinema in general. Filmed, once again, in the Chicago area, Cyd
presents an image of people living their lives in a manner that
appears untainted by fears of diference, feelings of superiori-
ty, or prejudices of any kind. And though its vibrant sensations
of yearning and discovery will be familiar to those who’ve seen
Cone’s prior work, the film’s spry celebration of civility and
parity, filmed with its intoxicating, sun-kissed aura, is perhaps
Cone’s most convincing argument yet for the necessity of fel-
lowship in existence.
Cinema Scope: You were raised in South Carolina and moved
to Chicago 14 years ago, but you also briefly moved to Los
Angeles for several months back in 2012. What brought you back
to the Midwest?
Stephen Cone: I felt like an LA move was premature in gen-
eral. I edited Black Box there, thinking it would be my big, grand
follow-up to The Wise Kids, because after The Wise Kids I was
invited to shadow a TV director at ABC Family, and I was like,
“Alright, I made it!” But then I realized that while that film did
“catch on,” it was never a crossover success—crossing over from
LGBTQ to the mainstream.
Scope: So The Wise Kids being classified as LGBTQ ultimate-
ly held the film back?
Cone: Yes, but that has nothing to do with the content. It has
to do with the fact that it premiered at Outfest LA, and that no
one in US indie or mainstream circles had any idea who I was
at that point. Kim Yutani, who was the director of program-
ming at Outfest and also programmed for Sundance, found
The Wise Kids in a pile and was like, “I don’t know who you
are but this is the best movie I’ve found randomly in a pile in
a long time.” I had no intention of premiering at a gay festival.
But then Kim, along with David Courier, made a big efort to
get word out and help the film and me along. At one point there
was this wave of, “Ooh, what’s this hot new film on the scene?”
but it never really made a dent in the national film culture, and
ultimately it was branded as an LGBTQ film. It was quickly
apparent to me that I just needed to continue making my own
work—that if I were to end up in LA if would be a little later in
my career.
Scope: Does LA feel like your landing spot, then? The end-
point for when you’ve “made it”?
Cone: No, well, not in the traditional sense. I just happen to
really love that city. Everything that everyone finds sad and
lonely about LA I find really magical and comforting. Would I
be open to directing episodic television every now and then? Of
course. It’s three weeks of work, I get to work with actors, maybe
make some unorthodox choices. That sounds great, but I don’t
know what I’d do other than what I’m doing now. First and fore-
most, I want to make movies, wherever I am.
Scope: Is the appeal of being in LA at all driven by a desire
to film the city itself? LA has its aura and history that so many
filmmakers are drawn to.
Cone: Oh yeah, totally. All of my ideas and media interests
15
right now take place in either the South or the West. I currently
have no Chicago ideas on the docket.
Scope: What’s wrong with Chicago?
Cone: Oh nothing! I’m just not terribly interested in filming
it. There’s a sort of blue-collar, Midwestern thing here which I
didn’t grow up with. I grew up in the South. Chicago has nour-
ished me, fulfilled me, given me a really comfortable, happy life,
great friends, not to mention incredible collaborators, but I’ve
never felt a spiritual kinship to the city itself. I’m drawn to the re-
gions that haunt me. I’m taken with the South, small towns, the
coast of South Carolina. I’m taken with California, the Pacific
Ocean, the beach, the desert, the mountains, and the sprawl of
the West. The vibe and landscapes of the Midwest just...I don’t
have a story there. If and when I film again in Chicago, it’ll prob-
ably just be bodies in interiors, not some urban crime drama.
I’m just not that interested in filming “city” cities.
Scope: Does your infatuation with the southern swamps or
West Coast beaches and deserts come from your own past expe-
riences in these places, or is it more of an ainity that you have
for these places from seeing them represented in cinema?
Cone: I think it’s a combination. The South is in my blood. I’m
probably inspired by my memory of being there. With the desert
and the West it’s a combination of my adult experiences with
movie memories. There’s something really magical about grow-
ing up on, for example, Spielberg movies with all those Southern
California family homes in E.T. (1982) and Poltergeist (1982)
and then being there later. I saw these places when I was a kid
growing up in Columbia, South Carolina, and then 25 years later
I went and it just felt so weird, like I was climbing into a dream
of childhood. My love of the desert is related to moviegoing,
probably, but I saw the Midwest in movies, too, and I don’t have
the same relationship.
Scope: A lot of your movies do tend to evoke a very deep
sensation of nostalgia, especially ones like Henry Gamble and
Princess Cyd, though the films don’t necessarily deal with sub-
ject matter that one would call nostalgic.
Cone: This is actually something I’m challenged by. Nostalgia
can only take you so far and so deep. Do I have concerns about
not going deep enough or about being too cozy? All the time,
constantly. It’s a desire of mine to create something that’s both
dreamlike or nostalgic, but also really complex and conflicted.
I’m fine with nostalgia as long as there’s a “there” there. Princess
Cyd is a little bit of an outlier because it’s the only movie I’ve
made or will make for a very long time that was deliberately in-
tended to be a comfortable, purely pleasurable experience. And
I told this to my crew: “I want this to be a movie that a mother
and her daughter can snuggle up on a couch and watch togeth-
er again and again.” In some ways, I wanted it to feel a little bit
like A Little Princess (1995), The Secret Garden (1993), How to
Make an American Quilt (1995), The Baby-Sitters Club (1995), or
whatever my version of those films is. So this was a conscious
efort to make something that would be nostalgic for others. I
mean, I didn’t live any of those experiences, that’s not my nos-
talgia. Henry Gamble is a diferent story. That’s me trying to
capture feelings that I had growing up. That’s genuine nostal-
16
gia, and so it’s a diferent kind of exercise. But even when it’s
genuine, I don’t think I’m motivated by nostalgia itself. As I’m
creating these things, I’m trying to find a way of tapping into
something sensual.
This gets into that thing of people calling the film “sweet” and
“nice.” When I was writing it, my main point of reference was
Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty (1996). I wanted it to be something
that people could luxuriate in, something that would be deeply
sensual. I wouldn’t say that my primary goal was to make a nice,
sweet film.
Scope: But where’s the line separating “nice and sweet” from
“comfortable”?
Cone: I would just like to think that people could still feel pas-
sionately about it, as opposed to being gently lulled. I had it in my
head that I wanted to make something that’s at once humane and
unassuming, but also something that people won’t forget. I don’t
want the work to be disposable, which is why I have these knee-
jerk responses to being called “nice” and “sweet.” Those adjec-
tives imply to me that you could flip the channel and just watch
something else that’s also “nice,” and I don’t want to be that.
Scope: This kind of ultra-sensorial niceness can contain
something enormous and unforgettable, though. I do feel about
as much comfort—perhaps niceness—from Henry Gamble as I do
Cyd, but another thing that they have in common is they both
introduce violence or traumatic plot elements in their latter
halves. On the one hand, these events re-establish some sem-
blance of unity between characters who were beginning to form
ideological barriers between themselves. But these moments
also work to ofset the sense that the movies are coasting on
pleasantries. They remove the veil of niceness, revealing some-
thing that was always present, yet hidden.
Cone: I understand that the films largely represent a kind of
dreamland, but there is a conscious efort on my part to make
sure that these stories aren’t just revealing protected pock-
ets of paradise in the world. They’re also showing that there is
pain underneath these worlds, and not everyone has support.
Yes, those moments you allude to from Henry Gamble and Cyd
serve similar functions, but they arise from diferent inspira-
tions and motives. Henry Gamble, for instance, wouldn’t even
exist without Ricky’s self-harm. That’s because I’d already made
The Wise Kids. Why would I make Henry Gamble if it weren’t de-
signed to have a diferent tone than The Wise Kids, or to display
a certain level of indictment that that film didn’t? Henry Gamble
was made for the Rickys. The whole reason for me wanting to
do that is I don’t know that I delved as brutally into loneliness
and hypocrisy in The Wise Kids as I wanted to or should have.
Then, with the attempted assault in Cyd, the idea was Miranda
is mind-obsessed, Cyd is body-obsessed, living cozily in their
compartments, and there needed to be a moment where they’re
both brought to earth, both ripped out of their little universes
and have to actually recognize other people’s oppression. Part
of that is to push back against the idea that it all represents a
utopian idea.
Scope: You disagree with those who call Princess Cyd a utopi-
an picture, then?

Cone: Oh, no, it’s certainly a utopia! I’ve spoken of it as a va-
cation from evangelical America, with “vacation” implying that
we’re going somewhere super-pleasant and welcoming in com-
parison. So I’ve admitted as much, but it’s not a utopia to the ex-
tent that it’s unrecognizable or doesn’t exist.
Scope: In some ways I think it came at just the right moment
for many North American viewers. You obviously began mak-
ing Cyd before the election, but there’s an almost aggressive
progressiveness to the community in the film. Miranda’s book-
club soirée, for example, includes probably the healthiest mix of
people from diferent races, sexualities, ages, religions, and so
on I’ve ever seen under one roof.
Cone: Right, though I’m not consciously exploring worlds of
repression and acceptance out of any kind of political motive.
When you grow up as the son of a Southern Baptist minister
in evangelical, conservative South Carolina, you’re going to
respond in some way that’s specific to that experience. And if
a conservative, middle-aged person watches my films and sees
people interrelating and connecting in a way that’s new to them,
I’ve always thought that that will enter their worldview in some
way. That’s the extent of the political thought, and it’s entirely
unconscious. In no way, shape, or form was Princess Cyd made
as a meditation on the transition to come, whether to Trump or
Hillary. It was made purely out of a desire to create a summer
dessert of a movie.
With regards to political filmmaking, though, right now I’m
reading Gabriella Oldham’s new book of interviews with John
Cassavetes. He’s my hero, and I’m very tolerant of most of the
things he says, but it’s annoying when he gets asked about pol-
itics. He always gets very angry and rants about how he’s just
trying to make movies about relationships, that he doesn’t give
The Wise Kids
a shit about politics and protests, that he’s gonna leave that for
other people. It’s such a profoundly ignorant way of addressing
that question, and he did this constantly. He constantly bragged
about how apolitical he was, and I keep reading these interviews
waiting for someone to ask, “But do you believe the personal is
political?” That’s all I want to ask deceased John Cassavetes.
“Does it trickle up, would you admit that?”
Scope: If I recall correctly, A Woman Under the Influence
(1974)—sometimes discussed as one of the first feminist movies,
speaking of politics—is your favourite film?
Cone: Yeah, it still is. Although I watched Minnie and
Moskowitz (1971) a couple of days ago and I was like wait, may-
be this is my favourite film? And maybe the next time I see The
Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) I’ll say the same thing. The
collective work of Cassavetes is my number one favourite mov-
ie of all time. When I’m watching one of his movies, it feels so
alive that it seems impossible that any of these people are dead,
and similarly, it feels like the very person of Cassavetes is phys-
ically extending from the frame and reaching out to whomever
is watching in the present tense. It’s like a communion is tak-
ing place. It’s the most active, in-the-room, three-dimensional
storytelling I’ve come across, and it feels actively alive in a way
that’s not remotely symbolic or metaphorical. He made his own
case for immortality. I mean, really, I feel like he’s not dead, and
that’s because his work was so generous. I feel the same way
about Jonathan Demme and Renoir.
Scope: Speaking of physicality, Jessie Pinnick has such a bold
presence and aura in the role of Cyd. Did the tone or structure
you had in mind change after you cast her? I can only imagine
the film would be completely diferent with anyone but her in
the lead.
17
 Cone: One of the mysterious problems that I have, film af-
ter film, is that often the character that I know the least is the
lead: Brea in The Wise Kids, Holly in Black Box, Henry in Henry
Gamble, and Cyd in Princess Cyd. They’re all cyphers. I’ll start
writing a script, and when I finish it and start getting notes from
friends they’ll say, “I love the script, but the lead character...I’m
not quite sure what to think of them.” I’ve started to kind of see
it as some secret blessing, even if it is a little bit of a problem. And
at some point I have to cross my fingers and hope that the actor
will fill in the blanks. If you’d read the original script for Cyd you
probably would’ve had a more traditional idea of her. Jessie was
a little taller than I expected, more unique-looking. But she and
I worked together to figure out who Cyd was. During production
I’d ask her for an immature take, and then a wiser one. I’d say,
“Give me 15-year-old Cyd, and now give me 23-year-old Cyd,”
and in that way I’d figure out how immature or blunt or “bull in
a china shop” she would need to be at any given moment. So in
that sense it’s a total collaboration, though not in terms of sto-
ry development. It’s funny, her first audition was a tape, and for
her callback she was out of town so she Skyped in for the follow-
up. I actually didn’t even meet her in person until the first day
of shooting.
Scope: What shaped the Miranda character?
Cone: Aunt Miranda was inspired by Marilynne Robinson,
who wrote probably my favourite novel, Housekeeping. As I was
making Cyd, I was aspiring to some of the melancholy, lyrical,
God-haunted tone of Housekeeping, specifically the 1987 movie
adaption by Bill Forsyth, which is really wonderful. But more
than anything, it was inspired by reading Robinson’s essays,
reading her theological beliefs, her progressive Christianity,
and her belief in the value of community, literature, and aca-
demia. So in some ways I was adapting someone’s personality
into a film.
I’m often more inspired to move forward with an idea by im-
agining it as a book description rather than a film synopsis. I’m
interested in the expanses of literature and in the inner life and
wide swath of humanity that literature can portray. I’m contin-
ually challenging myself to do something equally rich in under
two hours. But even if one of my movie ideas has nothing to do
with a book, I’ll still try to imagine its book cover—not the movie
poster, the book cover. Maybe I’m more interested in the shape
of written stories than I am the shape of screenplay narratives.
Scope: Is there any appeal of TV serials for you then? Given,
for example, the breadth of character development that that
form afords. And the episodic structure, which has rhymes
with the chapter breaks of a book.
Cone: It’s a question I get a lot actually: “When will we see
the sequel to Henry Gamble? To The Wise Kids? Maybe it should
be a TV show!” I heard that a lot early on, but I’m kind of a mov-
ie snob. My comments about literature maybe aren’t so literal.
I am interested in the challenge of working within a two-hour
time span, swaying from the typical questions regarding who
the protagonist is, what they want, how they change, etc. I love
that in a book you can jump time and characters, you can tell
18
several stories at once, and I know that TV is better at doing that
than film. But even when I’m writing an 80-minute script, I’m
still thinking about how expansive I can be, or about how many
mindsets and spirits can be represented within a single story.
Scope: Would you say the appeal of this expansiveness is re-
lated to your interest in metatheatre? I’m thinking of the con-
ceits in some of your early features like Black Box, The Mystery
of Life, and to some extent The Wise Kids, with the staging of the
birth of the baby Jesus.
Cone: Well, it’s constantly at the front of my mind, this du-
elling impulse to either make something metatheatrical or
as a more conventional, less self-reflexive story. I guess it just
points to the fact that I have a narrow set of interests: perfor-
mance, identity, sexuality, religion, sensuality, fulfillment,
creation, growth, cross-generational issues. And it’s something
I have to do, to move from one set of interests to another. It’s
the same with my influences, which I’m always grateful to hear
that I don’t wear on my sleeve. At any given moment the influ-
ence could be Jacques Rivette or Robert Mulligan, or a James L.
Brooks or Tsai Ming-liang, Malick or Nancy Meyers. That’s one
of the burdens of being a cinephile who also makes work, right?
Like, who the fuck am I?
Scope: Or as a young Jonathan Demme put it, Who Am I This
Time?—speaking of films about the making of a play.
Cone: Yep! I saw that Kurt Walker paired that together with
Henry Gamble in MUBI’s end-of-year “fantasy double features”
piece. But yeah, I was a theatre kid, and I guess that’s part of that
impulse. There’s a reason I chose to make Black Box as opposed
to a cult horror film. I guess I’d rather tell a story about someone
making something than…the something, you know? But I some-
times get bummed out when I see too many meta art films, be-
cause I want it to remain a unique and beautiful thing. And then
I’m also worried about stifling my own ideas, like if I’m thinking
about making a movie about a play or a movie and then I see a
bunch of movies coming out about plays and movies, I’m like,
OK, maybe I’ll hold of.
Scope: But you’re going beyond that and making work that
also comes from other life experiences, namely faith. Your first
short, Church Story (2005), while it has a prominent Dreyer in-
fluence, is a very personal vision that only someone who grew
up with a minister for a father would have access to. And even
your films that are “about” putting on a play end up expressing
something deeply spiritual. It’s one of the drawbacks of classi-
fications. The idea of the “Christian film” has a certain nega-
tive connotation, and there aren’t many filmmakers who make
faith-driven work at a high level.
Cone: Early on, even as I was transitioning out of my own
Christianity, it was all about Dreyer and Bergman, though
Bergman is a bit ponderous and heavy. They were dealing in-
tensely with faith in a way that I hadn’t seen before. But beyond
that, I never really see these kinds of experiences explored in
a serious way. Oh, the frank discussions about religion you see
in a movie like You Can Count on Me (2000), these were mean-
ingful to me. But I don’t know that I’ve fully gone there yet.
 The Changing View of
Man in the Portrait
Errol Morris’ Wormwood
BY LAWRENCE GARCIA
On November 28, 1953, Frank Olson, a civilian American scientist
and Central Intelligence Agency employee, fell or jumped through
a window from the 13th floor of the Hotel Statler (now the Hotel
Pennsylvania) in midtown Manhattan. Thus begins Errol Morris’
plunge into the sordid, sensational CIA “mind-control” program
known as MK-Ultra, with Peter Sarsgaard’s defenestrated body
flailing in slow motion alongside the opening credits, to the tune
of “No Other Love” from the 1953 Rogers and Hammerstein mu-
sical Me and Juliet. It’s a literally destabilizing overture to what,
11 feature documentaries and one aborted fiction film into his ca-
reer, stands as Morris’ most exemplary work to date: a six-part,
241-minute portmanteau of images and textures that utilize vir-
tually every tool in the documentarian’s formal arsenal. It’s an
obsessive plunge akin to that of Zodiac (2007), filtered through
the paranoia of The Parallax View (1974), albeit with a lot of
talking heads.
Sold to Netflix by Morris as a cinematic “everything bagel,”
Wormwood has a panoptic scope that toggles freely between var-
ious forms—direct interview material, fluid informational graph-
ics, re-enactments à la The Thin Blue Line (1988), among others—as
it dives into the reverberations of that foundational event. For the
Olson family, it would mean two decades of puzzling out an inex-
plicable suicide—initially attributed to a nervous breakdown—un-
til the Rockefeller Commission’s 1975 investigation into potential-
ly illegal CIA activity revealed a program of LSD experiments in
which the drug was tested on unsuspecting subjects, among them
Frank Olson. As reported in The New York Times by Seymour
Hersh, the narrative of Frank’s death morphed from suicide to
CIA negligence regarding the efects of the LSD, with threat of a
lawsuit, a $750,000 government settlement, and a formal apology
from President Ford himself following not long after.
Jumped or fell—it’s a distinction that would be amusing were the
implications less urgent, particularly with regards to the mecha-
nisms of oversight (or lack thereof) for an organization such as the
CIA. If an apparent suicide could turn out to be a product of bu-
reaucratic negligence, who’s to say that there wasn’t something far
more insidious at play, or that the “experiment suicide story” (as
David Kairys, one of the Olsons’ attorneys, phrases it) wasn’t just
19
another cover-up? In particular, Frank Olson’s work as an army
scientist at Fort Detrick, Maryland, which entailed research on
the aerosolization of anthrax and other agents, becomes a tenuous,
but significant link. Did his involvement, coupled with his post-
LSD instability, turn him into a security threat? That suspicion,
as well as the underlying possibility of murder, lingers through the
film, crucially unverifiable—like a mask beneath a mask, to borrow
from a psychologist’s assessment of the Olson case. And at the cen-
tre of it all is Eric Olson, the family’s eldest son, all of nine years old
at the time, who becomes the locus of Wormwood’s dizzying inves-
tigative black hole—a tormented search that is very much his own.
Despite its multiplicity—the opening minutes alone dance
through five or six disparate textures—Wormwood mainly func-
tions as an act of cinematic portraiture, a mode that Morris has
worked in from the start of his career, across a range of subjects.
(That’s entirely in keeping with the director’s most well-known
technical innovation, the Interrotron, which allows for interviews
in which the subject faces the camera and sees the interviewer at all
times, preserving a direct frontality and thus suppressing a layer of
remove.) But, at the same time, Wormwood constitutes a sustained
exercise in distanciation, beginning with an apocalyptic biblical
overture (which quotes from the passage in Revelations that gives
the film its title) to the sustained stretches of period drama. With
its plethora of alienation efects (theatrical staging, split-screens,
looped lines of dialogue), as well as its focus on the behavioural
science milieu of the Cold War era, these parts of Wormwood re-
semble the deliberate artifice of Michael Almereyda’s Sarsgaard-
starring Stanley Milgram biopic Experimenter (2015).
In his essay “The Changing View of Man in the Portrait” from
the 1969 collection The Moment of Cubism, John Berger argues
that the decline of the painted portrait and the corresponding rise
of photography, aside from being a by-product of the mechanical
ease the latter ofered, was also a response to the way “the meas-
ures, the scale-change of modern life…changed the nature of in-
dividual identity”—the recognition of the fact that a “likeness”
is suicient only to “identify…but no longer to explain or place.”
(It’s a view implicitly addressed in Morris’ 2016 film The B-Side,
in which Polaroid portrait artist Elsa Dorfman asserts her inter-
est not in souls but in surfaces, a repudiation of the de facto psy-
chological insight ascribed to portraiture in general.) With this in
mind, Wormwood might be viewed as an attempt to reconcile the
individual with no less than the indivisibility of the world—the
logical conclusion of Berger’s line of reasoning—an amalgamation
of various forms and genres that aren’t just part of, but are Eric
Olson’s story.
In many ways Eric Olson is the ideal Morris subject, not just for
his tendency to narrativize the trauma of his father’s death (he de-
scribes himself as “a broker of fragments”), but also for his obses-
sive fervour, which is a true match for the documentarian’s own.
It’s Olson who first makes the link between his story and Hamlet,
the parallels to which Morris pursues vigorously (and somewhat
maddeningly), not least during the belated exhumation of Frank
Olson’s remains in an attempt to uncover forensic evidence. And
it’s Olson, too—in his role as a Harvard-trained clinical psycholo-
gist—who provides the metaphorical shape of the narrative via
20
a formative technique developed in his doctoral thesis as “a sort
of antitoxin for psychic trauma”: the collage method. Though the
psychological implications would come to him later, Olson initial-
ly gravitated towards the physical act of putting together images,
largely sourced from magazines. The efect of the resulting work
is direct, rough almost—less aesthetically “composed,” say, than
the work of Lewis Klahr, and more driven by an immediate, liter-
al process of thought-visualization. (In an early collage of Eric’s,
a woman’s face looms over a high-rise building, with a body sus-
pended in mid-air and a broken clock at the bottom.)
If the form of the collage, as Olson contends, serves “as a
model of the mind’s fundamental process of representation and
symbolization,” then Wormwood acts as its cinematic analogue.
Overlapping images and textures recur: a swatch of patterned
wallpaper, the diaphanous glow of a curtain. Archival footage
flows into staged conversation, uncovered documents and mem-
os into imagined reality. The scripted dramatic sequences, co-
written by Molly Rokosz, Kieran Fitzgerald, and Steven Hathaway,
are unfixed and abstracted, tenuously suspended between the
Brechtian blankness of re-enactment and rigorously stylized fic-
tion. As in Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997), in which the links
between the film’s four principal subjects are never explicitly
drawn, there’s an associative fervour in the editing here that cre-
ates an amorphous, ever-changing web of connections. Layers of
secrecy emerge throughout the saga, mainly with the Colby doc-
uments (obtained from the CIA director in July 1975), but also
through Morris’ various interviews, such as that with the family’s
lawyer Harry Huge, who notes that US law allows the government
to be sued for negligent death, but not murder. Information twists
and turns, always just out of reach. It’s a fulfillment of the collage
structure, which Olson describes as the reconciliation of the maze
(a “lattice-work of images…in which one becomes lost or trapped”)
and the spiral (quoting from Sartre, the form that allows one to
“pass again and again by the same points, but at diferent levels of
integration and complexity”). As with the title card’s amorphous,
black-and-white swirl, the overall efect is disorienting, with each
scene ofering mutable contours of a grand design, localized vorti-
ces of a dramatic flow, but never a fixed shape, only an impression
of the elusive whole.
If there’s a major flaw to the endeavour, it’s that the authorial
tension that might exist between subject and documentarian is ob-
viated by Morris’ over-attentiveness to Olson’s self-interrogation,
his undue fidelity to a personal narrative that could be more pro-
ductively challenged and ruptured, especially given the project’s
sprawling canvas. But lest it seem perverse to subordinate the ur-
gent political, historical, and sociological dimensions of the Frank
Olson story—questions of surveillance, governmental transparen-
cy and accountability, the foundations of democracy—to the impact
on a single individual, it’s worth considering Eric Olson’s view of
the collage as a medium that negotiates “between collective and
individual representations.” It could well be a summation, or at the
very least, a corollary to Morris’ recurring interest in such tensions
or contradictions, present in something like Tabloid (2013), which
alternates between a personal, first-person narrative and a sala-
cious media frenzy, but most evident in both The Fog of War (2003)
and The Unknown Known (2013), in which the authority wielded by
their respective subjects (former Secretaries of Defense Robert S.
McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld), extends naturally to an explo-
ration of representational scale and power. (A question asked in
both, repeated almost verbatim in Wormwood: “Do you feel you’re
in control of History, or is History controlling you?”)
Morris’ vision articulates the crux of Berger’s view, the fact
that “nothing can contain itself.” A single angle, a fixed point of
view is no longer enough. So, Morris abandons the Interrotron for
a ten-camera set-up, and the frame itself is unmoored, skipping
across various angles in the space of seconds. Structured, metro-
nomic rhythms routinely force the viewer to look beyond the im-
age, allowing for a continual flow between the collective and the
individual, crescendoing in entrancing montages, particularly to-
wards the end of the third and fourth episodes, that explode any
lingering notions of a fixed, stable portrait. (That Morris ends each
of the six parts on such “clihangers” is the film’s main concession
to the intended episodic form, which was nonetheless edited into
a continuous theatrical version—of similar length, with only the
episodic interstitials removed—for awards eligibility.)
At its best, the film embodies Olson’s reference to Kierkegaard
on the “dizziness of freedom,” its various anxieties—of the Cold
War, post-Watergate, post-Vietnam era—dovetailing with, in ef-
fect, a creative anxiety, an impulse to fill in the gaps of informa-
tion dredged up by that crux event. The story of Frank Olson is,
in efect, one of freedom and control—“mind-control” in the case
of the MK-Ultra program—in which facts are as malleable as indi-
vidual consciousness, and where truth is but a matter of will. The
emblematic image is of Sarsgaard reclined beneath a hemispheric
glass contraption (related to a paraspychology technique known
as a Ganzfeld procedure) in order to “make him think the right
[thoughts],” which recalls the enduring image of a pocket watch
swinging across the void—an attempt to uncover truth by hypno-
sis—in The Thin Blue Line.
Uncertainty, unknowability, and the nature of truth are sub-
jects that Morris has revisited throughout his career, specifically
in relation to (American) structures and systems of authority. And
despite its overt epistemological explorations, conspiratorial tone,
and more unconventional trappings, Wormwood still bears the
hallmarks of traditional journalistic reportage. But there’s been
a marked change as well: the relative certainty of something like
the Randall Dale Adams case—built around a clear miscarriage of
justice, with a self-evident corrective goal—has been traded in for
McNamara’s fog, Rumsfeld’s flurry of memos (nicknamed “snow-
flakes”), or the recurring image of the sea in The Unknown Known.
It’s a shift from thin blue line to churning, Rorschachian haze.
Which brings us back not to Olson but Seymour Hersh, now
decades and numerous journalism awards removed from when he
first broke the story in 1975. Although an acquaintance of Morris’,
on camera he’s irascible and belligerent, not evasive, but certain-
ly not forthcoming. Accused by Olson years back of accepting the
provided narrative of the Colby documents and dismissing the
possibility of murder, Hersh returned to an unnamed CIA source
to uncover the truth, as vexed as that term may be in this context.
And he finds it. Disclosure, though, is another matter entirely, and
Hersh refuses to speak, because to do so would “turn someone into
a Snowden,” the implication being that the information isn’t worth
the risk. (Hersh again: “The fact that you can’t get closure in this
thing will be of great satisfaction to the CIA...You can mark up one
for them, zero for us on this one.”)
So the film ends, irresolute, uncertain, hurtling toward a
known unknown, with the finale (aptly titled “Remember Me”) re-
turning to the narrative zero point twice over, presenting a mixed
state of possibilities in rapid succession, the doors to Room 1018A
of the Hotel Statler still firmly shut. The events of November 28,
1953, the Rockefeller Commission, the Colby documents, Seymour
Hersh, etc.—all fold back into the story of a single man, adrift in
decades’ worth of speculation. To return to Berger one final time:
“Every mode of individuality now relates to the whole world.” And
in Eric Olson’s final estimation, it’s all bitter. All that remains, as
the closing image of a hotel maid vacuuming the now-empty hall-
way suggests, is for the details to be swept up into oblivion.
21
Working Girls

The revolution has been victorious, and the Social Democrats

Whatever have been governing the US for a decade under the banner of
equality for all. But sexism and racism still run rampant, lead-
ing to the foundation of a Women’s Army comprised of divergent

Happened groups that have to unite their diferent perspectives under

a common cause...and they do. The revolution will be trans-
mitted by pirate radio. The fantasy premise of Lizzie Borden’s

to Lizzie feminist guerrilla classic Born in Flames (1983) may not exactly
evoke the current situation in the US, but it still speaks to our
moment, as proven by the successful tour of Anthology Film

Borden?
BY CHRISTOPH HUBER
“This fight will not end in terrorism and vio-
lence. It will not end in a nuclear holocaust.
It begins in the celebration of the rites of
alchemy. The transformation of shit into gold.
The illumination of dark chaotic night into
light. This is the time of sweet, sweet change
for us all.”
—from a pirate radio broadcast in Born
in Flames
Archives’ recent 35mm restoration. Born out of anger and shot
over five years in the streets of New York with cheaply rented
16mm cameras on a budget of $30,000, Borden’s witty and en-
ergetic punk-spirit agitprop wake-up call has stood the test of
time. Ominously ending with the blowing up of the World Trade
Center (actually, only the transmitting antenna at its top), its
protest agenda is still valid—maybe even more so—in the age of
Trump. But whatever happened to its maker?
Following her breakthrough with Born in Flames—the film
even made the front page of The New York Times upon release,
where it was attacked as an example of the wastage of govern-
ment arts grants—Borden scored again with Working Girls
(1986), another study of female group dynamics and notions
of solidarity and resistance, but one pitched in a completely
diferent register. In Working Girls, Borden’s feminist sensibil-

22
ity plays out in a restrained, slyly subversive study of a day in a
middle-class New York brothel, turning clichéd notions about
prostitution on their head and focusing the all-round-rebellious
spirit of its predecessor on issues of economy and exploitation:
sex labour is treated as a valid, even positive option, crushed by
the inequalities of the capitalist system.
When Borden then embarked on her first studio project, Love
Crimes (1992), she was taken aback as the shoot quickly descend-
ed into disaster. Although even the compromised end result
bears enough traces of Borden’s demystifying feminist agen-
da—basically tackling the then-popular, male-centred erotic
thriller genre from the opposite perspective—it left her artisti-
cally disappointed, as did her contribution to the 1994 omnibus
film Erotique (a telephone sex-worker short that makes for a
fascinating sidebar to Working Girls, but which was also man-
gled in production) and her for-hire television work, including
some interesting items for the Playboy Channel and Zalman
King’s Red Shoe Diaries. While she has no oicial credits after
1998, Borden has kept writing (and doing script-doctor servic-
es) and trying to develop television pilots and film projects; one
of these, Rialto, about a female abortionist in the 1950s, nearly
got of the ground when Susan Sarandon committed to play the
lead, but then 9/11 happened and negotiations were put on hold.
Quite recently, however, Borden’s forgotten first film
Regrouping (1976) re-emerged after nearly four decades.
Originally intended as a collaborative portrait about (and with)
a group of New York women artists trying to form a feminist col-
lective, it changed considerably once the group started to break
up, and an antagonized Borden decided to refashion the whole
enterprise as a “subjective statement, a manipulation” (per the
opening titles). A fascinating documentary-essay hybrid shot in
sometimes-luminous black-and-white 16mm, Regrouping in-
terweaves the initial material with more hopeful scenes about
a second female group. Yet all assumptions are constantly ques-
tioned, not least through a layered voiceover, the multitude of
voices intensifying the sometimes puzzling but artful arrange-
ment of divergent material. A great document about the utopian
hopes (and blind spots) of second-wave feminism, Regrouping
emerges as a study in contradictions both in form and topic, best
summed up by two conflicting statements that bracket it: “This
is the beginning of sisterhood,” says one member of the original
group near the start, whereas the last sentence is simply, “But I
don’t agree with you.”
Picketed by the infuriated original protagonists on the occa-
sion of its Anthology premiere, Regrouping showed once more
at the Edinburgh Film Festival, then was shelved by Borden
in light of the melee. But, reminded of its existence a few years
ago, she decided to dig out her only print, showing it again at
Anthology in tandem with the restoration of Born in Flames and
on a few more occasions, including Edinburgh and most recent-
ly at the Austrian Film Museum, where Borden attended as a
guest on the occasion of the retrospective “Bigelow & Co.” The
idea behind the series was to showcase Kathryn Bigelow’s work
in a diferent context, presenting her not as standalone action
auteur but in the company of other notable female filmmakers—
Susan Seidelman, Amy Heckerling, and especially Borden—who
had similarly started out in other artistic disciplines, then got
bit by the movie bug as they delved into the bustling (proto-) No
Wave scene of ’70s New York. Like Bigelow, Borden had started
out as a painter, and the two became close friends: they helped
out on each other’s early film work, and have remained in con-
tact (“We still go hiking once a year,” says Borden).
Another point of the retrospective was to demonstrate how,
in the ’80s, opportunities for female directors coming from
independent and art backgrounds opened up at the mid-range
level of studio production, only to disappear again in the ’90s
when the increase of blockbuster movies (which were hardly
ever assigned to woman directors) efectively dried up the well
of more modestly budgeted assignments. That niche was subse-
quently taken over by television, which is where Seidelman and
Heckerling have since relocated almost exclusively; Bigelow was
the exception who proved the rule, though her stint as one of the
only women entrusted with large-scale, action-oriented studio
pictures derailed with the failures of Strange Days (1995) and
K-19: The Widowmaker (2002) and necessitated some TV inter-
ludes as well, until she rebounded with her independently pro-
duced Oscar triumph The Hurt Locker (2008). Surely the most
radical of the quartet, Borden also had a devastating experi-
ence with Hollywood, and has been almost invisible for the last
two decades. But she maintains a positive outlook, as attested
to in the following career interview, which also discusses the
background of Regrouping, whose upcoming Anthology pres-
ervation will hopefully refocus attention on a singular female
filmmaking voice.
Cinema Scope: You started out as a painter. What kind of
paintings did you make?
Lizzie Borden: I always wanted to be an artist. New York was
the epitome of bohemianism for me, but my parents wouldn’t
let me go there, considering it too dangerous even though they
were from Brooklyn. I was painting and drawing, but they want-
ed me to go to an all-women’s college instead of NYU. It didn’t
have a painting major, so I studied art history and hitchhiked to
New York all the time. One of my teachers said I should write for
an art magazine, so I started at Artforum. My painting, which
at school was figurative, turned abstract when I moved to New
York five years later. I had learned so much about art history that
I saw everything as derivative, because I was in the thick of it as
a critic. Knowing too much about art destroyed painting for me.
At one point I painted my entire loft. I only have one photograph
left of what it looked like: I filled big, yellow geometric shapes on
the ceiling and on the floor. But other people were doing that, so
I don’t think I made one original thing—so much was a response
to other stuf going on. I felt my work was really bad, which was
part of what attracted me to a Godard retrospective. There I saw
a way of putting together an essay—what I was doing as a crit-
ic—and storytelling. Not linear storytelling, but agitprop. I had
become very politicized. The radical experience for me was see-
ing all of Godard’s films at one time, and his concept. It wasn’t
about loving one particular film—some were really boring and
23

just went on and on. So I really did enter filmmaking very much
outside the realm of school.
Scope: A completely autodidactic approach.
Borden: Yeah. I also stopped reading art theory because of
my dilemma—I’ve become interested in that again only recent-
ly. And I was aware of the corruption in the art world: so much
was about money and power, which I was rebelling against. I just
wanted to be done with it. So there was a kind of innocence in my
first two films. I really tried to approach things the way I expe-
rienced them and not as I knew them to be, especially in Born in
Flames, where I was rejecting many other things like whiteness
and middle-classness—even my own—and also reacting to the
milieu of Regrouping. Still, seeing its thank-you credits again, I
was surprised to see how many artists had contributed. Barbara
Kruger came by my place more than once, appearing in the film
and commenting on it in voiceover. I had shared a loft with Ross
Bleckner, who owned the Mudd Club building. Everything hap-
pened at the Mudd Club just around the corner. I wasn’t a big
party person, but everybody came by—people like Nan Goldin,
who would later do the still photos for Working Girls.
Scope: It sounds like a community where people helped each
other out, which is probably the only way Regrouping and Born
in Flames could be realized.
Borden: Totally. The atmosphere was so creative. Near the
beginning of Born in Flames, I made a big efort with a scene
at this idyllic loft on the third floor of the Mudd Club building.
I had the Women’s Army hanging out, lying around in a deco-
ration of Roman tapestries, and I shot for eight hours—a total
waste of film. I used maybe 20 seconds of it, but Ross was so
helpful; everybody was. Back then, you could rent cameras
24
Born in Flames
for $25, then get people to help. I always had big old American
cars—Cadillacs, Lincoln Continentals—and a fake film permit
so I could park on the streets. For Kathryn Bigelow’s student
short The Set-Up (1978), we put my car in the alley where those
two guys beat each other up. In turn, Kathryn did voiceover on
Regrouping and appeared in Born in Flames, although I think
she looks bored all the time; she was probably doing the shot list
for her next film in her head. There was an amazing crossbreed
of people on Born in Flames: downtown theatre groups—Ron
Vawter was in The Wooster Group, and a real actor, whereas so
many of the others were not—Eric Bogosian had his first film
role and was annoyed just sitting there, and there were down-
town punk singers like Adele Bertei. But I felt Born in Flames
was not part of the No Wave aesthetic, being more political. It
was a conscious step away. I thought many of those films were
unnecessarily stretched out, so I aimed for a faster tempo.
Scope: That’s part of the reason Born in Flames has retained
this raw energy. But there’s also an astonishing sense of free-
dom already present in Regrouping, even though restrictions
were imposed during shooting. Both films are characterized by
openness, movement into many diferent directions.
Borden: Regrouping came together in the editing: it was like
a film inside the film. In the finished version, you see the pro-
jection of the first version on the wall of my loft, with a lot of
people milling around because it was the first screening ever.
That’s where all the trouble started, because the original group
of women complained: “You can’t do this.” It was too raw for
them, and we drifted apart. So editing the material became
the thing for me. It’s like writing, and I loved it: working on a
Steenbeck was hypnotic. Every time you make an edit, you see
 Born in Flames
the magic that happens. By editing you start to throw out, the
opposite of what I was doing in essays. You start to intuit, build-
ing your intuition through editing, and somehow your intuition
then builds a structure. You know what works and what doesn’t
work. I wasn’t concerned with screenplay structure back then: I
only studied that after Working Girls, once I got in trouble with
Love Crimes, when they threw away the script I had signed on to
shoot. But in those freer days I really worked from the centre
out: watch the footage already shot, which would tell you where
to go. In Regrouping, at first I really just tried to follow this
group of women, hence the title: I had to regroup once the orig-
inal direction changed. So I created another group, and many
regroupings followed throughout the film. It became a sociolog-
ical study, a story about creation and falling apart.
On Born in Flames, I didn’t want that to happen again, which
is hard, because betrayal of trust can happen so easily. How to go
from trust betrayed to regrouping to trust again? Because that’s
what has to keep happening: trusting again, finding new ways to
negotiate. That kind of communication is so important right now,
politically. It’s what I tried to show in Born in Flames. The groups
are always negotiating their positions: from the two radio stations
in the centre to the three female editors, one of whom is played by
Kathryn Bigelow. All were playing versions of themselves, creat-
ing their own arguments and dialogue within the film’s context.
Sometimes we would do improvisations over and over.
Scope: Your first two films organize the material as col-
lage: the Godardian influence shows, down to the very layered
soundtracks.
Borden: The method was foremost born out of necessity, but
then used intentionally to create density and achieve things im-
possible in a linear narrative. You need layers to convey many
voices at a time. In Born in Flames, the strategy is also a state-
ment of politics. And I wanted music at all points, so even if peo-
ple didn’t want to listen, this martial beat would grip them. Just
be radical—think radical! After the film, people often ask if I be-
lieve in violence. I don’t, but if it got that far...what would it take
to lead a group, any group, to open rebellion? And what would
be the result? In my experience, it’s usually not worth it, even
as I used The Battle of Algiers (1966) as my model and borrowed
a scene: when Ron Vawter draws on the blackboard to explain
the resistance structure of small cells. Let’s call it an homage.
Born in Flames depicts an escalation of efort—let’s try com-
munity talk, let’s try leaflets, let’s try peaceful demonstrations,
let’s try radio appeals, let’s try more—until the agreement: “OK,
we need armed struggle, what gives?” Then it’s about getting
on the airwaves, taking over the media. The only bloody body
you see in the film is when the cops are hitting this guy over the
head...I can’t even remember where I got the footage from. But
you don’t see the Women’s Army bloodying a person. There’s a
common goal in Born in Flames, whereas in Regrouping there’s
a lot of doubt, with those sayings contradicting each other over
and over, analogous to a self-consciousness-raising group. It’s a
hall of mirrors that ends up not going anywhere.
Scope: Born in Flames has become an underground classic,
and its recent restoration has travelled quite a bit.
Borden: It’s been taught a lot in universities and written
about. When I go somewhere, usually somebody says, “I studied
that,” which to me always sounds like, “I saw it in preschool.”
And it’s always been on YouTube in some weird way. But it all
got to another level, probably because the restoration coincid-
25
ed with Occupy Wall Street and this total Trump thing. After
all, it is a resistance film, an angry film. The Q&As were almost
like town-hall meetings with people able to talk about what they
felt went wrong and how things haven’t changed. I’ve gone to
some of these places to see how young people think, and there’s
always this interesting combination of people who had seen it
when it first came out and millennials relating to it. Because bi-
zarrely, it mirrors the way things are now in the US, stirring up
the same emotions. Though I get similar feedback all over the
world. Yet the fact the film is relevant today actually makes me
very sad: these issues aren’t solved.
Scope: Focusing on a group of women, the question of sol-
idarity and what constitutes freedom, Working Girls follows
through on many of the same themes. But style and tone are
completely diferent: Born in Flames is hot and angry, Working
Girls is cool and slightly bemused. The johns are portrayed sa-
tirically, but they are also pathetic. Interestingly, the villain is
not male: rather, it’s the brothel mother, exploiting the other
women for profit.
Borden: Actually, the greatest compliment I ever got for
Working Girls was when some guy said to me afterwards, “I
had a boss just like that.” It really is about capitalism. After
having made something that took so long with Born in Flames,
I wanted to do something really contained to focus on some of
its themes—exploitation and labour—via sexual politics in the
sex industry. It’s almost a play, taking place almost exclusively
on one set. So collage was not an option: I needed restraint and
visual clarity. I wanted a female DP. Some of the other camer-
awomen I considered came from documentary films and might
have gone for a rougher look, but I chose Judy Irola, who real-
ly believed in a pinned-down camera. It’s puzzling to me that
some people still think it’s a documentary. I mean, it’s all based
on a real brothel and I wanted the viewer to feel like a fly on the
wall, but so many shots are obviously set up, with weird angles.
Maybe people have become so used to the high-tech look of what
they call Hollywood films these days, which just means movies
that cost a lot. Clearly, my film is not like that.
Scope: As a portrait of a day in a brothel, it has a Wiseman-
like quality. Not the way it’s shot, but the casualness of its every-
day observations, and its structure as a procession of rituals:
preparations, clients, negotiations, sex (mostly as role play),
downtime breaks. What emerges is a meditation on the com-
modification of sex.
Borden: That’s a great compliment—Wiseman is such a geni-
us. And there is a direct cinema connection: D.A. Pennebaker
was helpful to me in getting grants, and Ricky Leacock played
one of the clients in Working Girls, the one who wants to get tied
down. He was great, and said, “I hope to be fired from MIT on
charges of moral turpitude.” Otherwise, the acting is all over the
place: some women were real working girls, and the Asian johns
I had to get from Screw magazine, buying an ad when I couldn’t
find actors. It was a welcome change for me to have a certain
amount of money: $100,000, most of which went into building
the set, so we couldn’t aford to pay the actors union salaries,
only $75 a day. We were lucky, as when the Screen Actors Guild
26
read the script, they said: “This is pornography. We don’t regu-
late pornography. So you can pay the actors whatever you want.”
It’s quite hilarious they thought it was pornography.
Scope: The sex scenes are decidedly unerotic, but there are
your typical funny touches.
Borden: I always say that anybody who gets turned on by this
film really has a problem. No raincoat guys. Still, others might
still think it’s erotic in a way. But the humour is very important
for my films. Dark humour.
Scope: The ending of Working Girls adheres to a typical story
arc in films about prostitution, but the implications are diferent.
Borden: My problem with films about the sex industry is that
there are only two endings: the woman leaves or she dies in some
way. Only now, working on a book about strippers, I’ve realized
there’s a third option: she brands herself and sets up a business,
which has become such a viable choice for women, even into
their 40s. For Working Girls I had to create a reason for the lead
character to leave that wasn’t just her being abused or hurt by
the men, yet was logical within the framework of the story. She
knows what she can handle: she can take one shift, that’s how
she finances her work in photography. When the madam begs
her to stay on, she actually lies, already intending for her to do
a double shift. In the second shift, the lighting goes from bright
to dark and she has clients who make her feel bad, especially
the guy from Kalamazoo who calls her a whore, whereas she’s
able to deal with the funny clients during daytime. The madam
assigning the double shift makes it a labour issue; additionally,
the clients make her feel bad about herself, so she quits because
she’s been exploited. I wanted to emphasize that her leaving is
based on work exploitation. And it’s just one day, so the ending
couldn’t have been as dramatic as in Jeanne Dielman (1975),
with the heroine killing someone. Chantal Akerman’s film was
more a psychological portrait about how the title character’s
daily life is set of by one thing going wrong; it’s about the psy-
chic toll on her. There’s also a statement about prostitution, be-
cause it’s treated like peeling potatoes. Whereas my protagonist
can handle her routine, but not a woman so clearly selling other
women. It’s ofensive to her.
Scope: It’s a film about labour, something you hardly see any-
more in mainstream cinema.
Borden: It’s true, and if people work it’s at fantasy jobs.
Recently I saw Girls Trip (2017), in which the jobs the female
characters are supposed to have won’t make them enough mon-
ey to have these apartments and so on, and it’s symptomatic.
And films aren’t really dealing with the drudgery of work. I’ve
had this crisis as an artist: what do you do so you have time to
do your own work? So many people say they wish they’d had
time to write a novel or do a painting, and inevitably name
Bukowski or one of these geniuses who can work as a postman
while writing 70 books. But in truth people get so worn down
by their work, and more recently, people with education don’t
find jobs when they finish their studies. On my stripper project
I’m working with a woman who writes for The New York Times
and five diferent magazines, like Bust; she also did a book called
Spent. She also teaches at UCLA, but once a week she drives to
 Regrouping
Palm Springs to strip, and another day she works as a waitress
to make ends meet. Such an amazing person, she looks like an
Amazon, and has tattoos all over the place, and she can really
work the pole—she’s an amazing dancer. But she’d like to write
and teach all the time. The idea of gratifying work, especially
for anybody who wants to be creative, gets squashed by most
jobs. Job problems make you dread going to work everyday. You
need freedom, silence, and quiet. In Working Girls I basically
ask, what is worse? Forty hours a week in some boring oice job,
or eight hours in a brothel? It depends on what you can handle.
Some people can’t deal with it, but is renting out your body for
eight hours really worse than renting your mind for 40 hours by,
say, working at Kinko’s?
Scope: I know you don’t consider Love Crimes as your movie,
but one can still see the subversive approach, even if it doesn’t
quite amount to a feminist deconstruction of the erotic thriller.
What went wrong?
Borden: Well, on the first day of shooting it turned out that
our lead Sean Young had never even read the script, and she had
committed to the part only through her assistant. I had this re-
ally interesting screenplay by Allan Moyle, who had made Pump
Up the Volume (1990), and originally I wanted diferent actors.
Isabelle Huppert and Natasha Richardson wanted to do it, but
Harvey Weinstein insisted on Sean Young—by now we know
why. So Sean showed up, only having read the script just then:
“It sucks. This is the worst script I’ve ever read. Forget it.” So
the original screenplay went out of the window, and instead
I got notes every day, both from Miramax executives and the
European distributor, and they were completely contradictory.
Literally pages of conflicting advice. I was frozen, constantly
asking myself, “What will we be shooting today?” Sean hated
every moment of it, and said things like, “Come to my trail-
er. The only way I’ll talk to you is if you stand on your head in
this yoga pose.” And I wasn’t even doing yoga back then! It was
just awful.
Scope: You wanted to take your name of the film?
Borden: I should have quit right then. As a director who’d
always edited her own stuf until it was ready, I thought that I
could always make something out of it given enough time. But
this was not how it worked. The European company hired Kit
Carson to direct flashbacks, thinking that would fix it. I guess
what you still can see are merely some ideas of Allan’s original
script, but unfulfilled. When I wanted to take my name of the
film, Harvey basically said, “If you do that I will destroy your
career.” He didn’t let me have final cut, and threatened I’d be
out of work because I was “diicult.” With Erotique, again the
producer changed my music, changed my cut. So I thought I’d
write to find my way back in, because starting with Love Crimes
I had been only been ofered other people’s scripts, erotic thrill-
ers and other really stupid stuf. I’d already realized that Harvey
really could do that: sending out the word I was diicult, even as
I was being trod upon. After that I had a very hard time. I was
in movie prison. I did a little TV after that, but when I asked my
agent, “Can’t I do an episode of NYPD Blue?” she’d answer: “No,
you have to do a Baywatch.” And I just couldn’t do that.
Scope: So what has happened since then?
Borden: Well, I kept on writing, but as time passed with-
out anything getting of the ground, I told myself that if I came
back, it had to be with something I really believe in, something
like Rialto or some pilots I wrote about citizen journalism or
Ana Mendieta—things with real substance. Whereas most stuf
that comes along just isn’t worth doing. If people haven’t heard
of you for a while, they think you aren’t doing anything, but
you have to stay optimistic. Use that Susan Sontag “aesthetics
of silence” argument, and stay quiet until you have something
to say.
27
Do It Again
On Ricky D’Ambrose’s Words and Images
BY PHIL COLDIRON

The quarrel between word and image is, on the eve of the third
millennium of an illustrious career, in a period of relative calm,
one marked by a casual cohabitation which has produced gratify-
ing results in the arts and considerable trouble elsewhere, where
it tends to be mistaken for the decay of a consensus on truth, or
at least the truth of a given matter. This trouble, felt acutely in
America but resonant globally, gnaws at the edges of much of our
times’ most sophisticated art. As the mid-century painters, who
tracked flatness and presence towards an absolute clarification
of the terms of their art, would likely be alarmed at the energies
now given to modes of figuration both literary and illusionistic,
so the filmmakers, led by Brakhage, who endeavoured to chase all
traces of language from their work might be horrified by the pile-
up of words, thick and consistent, found in Sara Cwynar’s Rose
Gold (2017) or Luke Fowler and Sue Tompkins’ Country Grammar
(2017). If criticism is to go on having any use, it may be in guarding
against the traps of dogma and nihilism by clarifying the ways in
which the imagistic qualities of words and the wordy qualities of
images operate within and without the fluid boundaries of what is
recognized as art. Notes on an Apperance
There is, of course, no shortage of artists whose work is primar-
ily concerned with this critical task: though no longer directed
towards the essential, the rigorousness of a work’s explication of

28
its historical position remains one of the chief measures of artistic
seriousness. Given the retreat of popular criticism into the role of
a clergy tasked with assuring its audience that an object has a sin-
gle, coherent point and that this point will not be missed or dwelt
on overmuch, most criticism today is in fact done by artists in the
name of art. Nevertheless, certain options remain available only
to critical activity relatively unburdened by aesthetic concerns.
Though the artist-critic dates to the origins of the practice—the
term “art criticism” entered the language through an unremark-
able British painter of the early 18th century—and though the di-
rector-critic, or cineaste (a term which opens the field to a variety
of para-critical activities), is central to film’s short history, it is
curiously the case that the American cinema, besotted at it was
by the New Wave, has produced next to no noteworthy examples
of this particular figure. We find instead either filmmakers whose
writing cannot be called critical in any traditional sense (Deren,
Markopoulos, Dorsky) or critics whose artistic practice was other
than film (Farber, Adler).
It comes as some surprise then that those on the forefront of
new filmmaking in New York are united by a cineaste interest
in structuring the critical context into which their work enters,
whether by programming films, translating or otherwise making
available the work of their predecessors, or writing criticism it-
self. That the seriousness, wit, and intellectual range of the films
of Gina Telaroli, Ted Fendt, and Ricky D’Ambrose sits at a marked
contrast to the collegiate aloofness of the previous generation of
young Americans is, plainly enough, a form of the criticism-in-art
mentioned above. Taken together with the work of those even
younger directors inspired by their examples who are just begin-
ning to make their first short films, this amounts to a significant
challenge to the typical style of independent film in the US over
the last six decades: naturalism. In taking Ricky D’Ambrose’s
work—one mid-length feature, three shorts (there is a fourth,
which he seems to view as student work), and a dozen articles in
various literary magazines, primarily The Nation—as paradigmat-
ic of a certain emerging tendency, I should not care to make him
speak for a group or school which does not exist, but simply to ofer
one example of how seriousness looks, or appears, today.
1. LOOKS
D’Ambrose’s “On Looks,” published in The Nation as
“Instagram and the Fantasy of Mastery,” is one of the few re-
cent examples of sensitive and sustained formal criticism of the
present visual economy to surface outside specialist or academ-
ic publications. (Others include a pair of essays on blackness by
Aria Dean, Erika Balsom’s survey of “the reality-based commu-
nity,” and Sarah Nicole Prickett’s lengthy engagements with Twin
Peaks and the figure of Wonder Woman.) In collecting, refining,
and combining positions first advanced in relation to topics as
far flung as the films of Straub-Huillet, the spectacle of “immer-
sive theatre,” the uses and abuses of transparency, and the sur-
realist writing of Max Blecher, it strikes an endearingly haughty
tone in playing the moth-eaten role of grand public intellectual
comically straight.
Though its SEO-inflected initial title feinted towards a judg-
ment on social media and The Way We Live Now, D’Ambrose’s con-
cern is, at bottom, to provide an updated toolbox for dealing with
the old-fashioned problems of form and content. His borrowed
term for the basic unit of visual culture, the “look,” emerges when
“creativity” usurps art, or “sensuous intelligence,” as the ideal of
cultural production. “What’s important to stress is that a look is
not a style,” D’Ambrose tells us, “if by style we mean the involun-
tary guiding plan of a work of art, or the transmission of an inef-
fable personal vision or sensibility into form.” We now have avail-
able to us both an inexhaustible supply of images and the means,
simple enough to be used by anyone with a computer or smart-
phone, to take them apart and keep only what suits our taste. As all
images reduce to homogenous “data sent out for processing,” every
element of a work is marked as potential content—“the frame dis-
appears,” as does the very notion of composition. It is not apparent
that this diagnosis demands a moral reckoning, though D’Ambrose
provides it with one, framing creativity as a sort of false conscious-
ness, a move which constricts a theory that might have covered the
full field of visual production to diminished relevancy outside the
narrow context of “the myth of total creativity...[which] comes
with its own stock figure: the young ‘creative,’ thoroughly urban-
ized, mainly white, typically heterosexual and male.” This is the
only context in which “I can do that, too” can be understood as the
expression of a sensibility as disagreeable as the one which leads a
parent, taking in an abstract or naïve painting, to claim, “My child
could do that.”
Still, the thinness of a theory does not foreclose the possibility of
its having considerable depth, and in voluntarily creating a “weak
theory,” D’Ambrose has avoided the problems of self-perpetuation
which would attend an attempt to root out looks at a global level. If
anything is available to the logic of the look—and it must necessar-
ily be—there is no reason to worry, at least in the first place, about
questions of the derivative or innovative (neither word appears
in “On Looks”). While his closing call for “a new view,” a phrase
which also ends his essay on Michael Haneke and appears at a cru-
cial moment in his first feature, Notes on an Appearance, tempts
such a reading, it is perhaps worth remembering that “fais-le de
nouveau,” the source of Pound’s call to make it new, translates
more comfortably as “do it again.”
2. APPEARANCE
When considered in its proper context, the critical potential of
D’Ambrose’s thinking blossoms against the background of elitism,
snobbishness, and pretension, all of which he gladly risks.  This
self-consciously refined social setting is the milieu of his films as
well: his characters, brownstone housesitters and sickly shut-in
observers languishing amidst brimming bookshelves, graduate
students living of fellowships and freelance assistants to National
Book Award winners, young women who are “well set up” in Milan
and the sons of Chappaqua they date, are the kids of Stillman’s
Urban Haute Bourgeoisie. He is working from the inside against
the deadening efects of privilege, which renders its subject, who
will never worry about hunger, recklessly appetitive, to use one of
29
his pet words. His position is that, given the world, it is the tenden-
cy of those who see themselves as the leading edge of culture today
to do nothing other than squander it.
Pilgrims (2013) and Six Cents in the Pocket (2015) approach this
issue obliquely. They both share a frame, the typical widescreen
of HD video, and a palette, the muddled greys and browns of fall
and winter in New York. Both star Michael Wetherbee, whose
face has the quality of fading youth Bresson favoured in his black-
and-white films. The earlier film, indeed, is modelled on Journal
d’un curé de campagne, charting the decline of its central figure
through a series of journal pages, held on screen as he speaks their
contents, which describe the following scene’s action, sapping its
drama. The latter introduces an equally canonical structure de-
rived from Antonioni and Godard, as it follows a young man go-
ing about a chaptered series of mundane tasks—framing a paint-
ing, courting a young woman—before a sudden event eclipses the
narrative and sets the film strolling, stunned, through emptied
urban space.
Spiral Jetty (2017) opens well beyond the hermetic worlds of the
earlier films. D’Ambrose expands on the use in Six Cents of a series
of postcards from abroad to narrate the arc towards its fracturing
incident to now introduce events entirely outside of what the cen-
tral figure, played by the director and publicist Bingham Bryant,
experiences directly. The story of a recently deceased psycholo-
gist of fraught renown is relayed through the sorting and exami-
nation of documents in his archive—clippings of essays and news-
paper stories, but also notes and VHS tapes. The tighter frame of
the Academy ratio proves more congenial to the settings, which
remain largely domestic (the exquisitely composed close-up now
predominates, rather than the somewhat ungainly medium shot)
and the saturated range of creams, reds, and greens allows for mo-
ments of purely expressive colour, most notably in a series of shots
which frame characters against inscrutable monochrome fields.
As “On Looks” brings together ideas tested across the writing
that preceded it, so Notes on an Appearance functions as a summa-
ry of the first phase of D’Ambrose’s filmmaking. Its style is, in its
particulars, nearly identical to Spiral Jetty: it retains its rich, pri-
mary palette and monochrome intrusions, its distant, cooling re-
lation to dramatic incident, and its intrusive, inciting story, again
related through documents, which shifts to the similarly fraught
legacy of a philosopher and political theorist, rather than a psy-
chologist. Bryant, a fascinating screen presence, capable of exqui-
site gradations of interest and repulsion, returns as a central fig-
ure, joined by Keith Poulson as Todd and Tallie Medel as Madeline,
comic performers who are both fixtures of recent New York film.
The narrative shape is again borrowed from familiar models, as
the sudden disappearance of Bryant’s David, who we are led to be-
lieve will be our guide through the film, sets in motion a scenario
owing equally to Psycho (1960) and L’avventura (1960). Most sig-
nificantly, it revisits and refines the rigorous musical form intro-
duced in Pilgrims, an approach to constructing a film which, in its
determination to maintain its images’ opacity, cannot precisely be
called either montage or découpage, and which is crucial to mak-
ing sense of the exit D’Ambrose cracks open from the anaesthetic
domain of the look.
30
That viewing these films in terms of what appears to be deriva-
tive and innovative in them is unlikely to lead to productive read-
ing or misreading is evident even from these brief sketches. They
argue, implicitly, that to understand our situation is to realize that
much of what we need, or believe we need, to see is already available
to us; to conceive of work on the principle of showing an audience
something they’ve never seen before leads to the miserably sim-
ple-minded discourses of virtual reality and empathy machines,
the unreflexive spectacle that goes by names like “Iñárritu.” One
can make do with ideas of composition, performance, and nar-
rative drawn from a tight range of canonical sources—Bresson,
Resnais, Antonioni, Duras, Akerman—when these parts of a film
are taken to function as, for example, colour does in Frank Stella’s
early shaped canvases, a role he has called “arbitrary, or intuitive.”
What this forces is the matter of taste, which, in the economy of
looks, becomes ambient or, to use D’Ambrose’s words, “uninten-
tional…like the weather.”
In the absence of taste, style, and art, what flourishes is the in-
teresting, the condition to which all looks aspire. If D’Ambrose’s
films can be said to have a signature shot, it is the close-up on a
face, its expression blank or opaque but for the downward gaze
of the eyes, which introduces a hint of shame. It is the image of
someone looking as if they were alone, which is precisely what the
characters who perform it are doing: in Pilgrims, watching online
streams of protests happening, it seems, within earshot, or in
Spiral Jetty and Notes watching the inscrutable VHS tapes of the
dead intellectuals Blumenthal and Taubes. This odd, anti-natu-
ralistic image of the posture many of our faces now hold for hours
each and every day was formalized by Petra Cortright—whose af-
fection for presets D’Ambrose quotes dismissively in “On Looks”—
in her 2007 video VVEBCAM. Taste, mercifully, can overcome our
more sober judgments.
Cortright’s video is situated in an acute lack of interest; she
seems not to care one way or the other about what she is looking at,
which is, presumably, the very image we’re watching. D’Ambrose
complicates this situation slightly, though he does not match its
intoxicating, afective pull. The dying young man in Pilgrims looks
through his computer at the world, where he sees that something
is happening, something which demands not just recollection, but
the creation of an archive in real time. His eyes might be best de-
scribed as feverish with intent. In contrast, Bryant’s gaze on the
VHS material in Spiral Jetty and Notes is situated somewhere in
the realm of the incredulous. His voiceover narration in the lat-
ter confirms as much: “I rarely saw anyone in any of these record-
ings. Their importance was unclear.” This footage—a tourist’s
home movies of an anonymous beach, the Haydarpaşa station
in Istanbul, European cities seen from trains, the World Trade
Center viewed from a boat of the base of Manhattan—is of in-
terest, a candidate for the archive, solely because of its apparent
source. This genuinely vulgar auteurism is rhymed by the fact that
these images, shot on VHS, have a particularly marked look in con-
trast to the material that surrounds them.
But where did they come from? Is this D’Ambrose’s earliest
footage? Though such views of the World Trade Center can’t help
but take on an overwrought symbolic dimension in a film circling
 Notes on an Appearance
a disappearance, what such images of the towers insist upon most
forcefully, in the plain absence of an efects budget, is their age.
That is, they stay where they were, historically speaking, and resist
attempts to render them detachable or transparent, to bring them
fully into circulation (this clarifies, as well, the relationship be-
tween looks and nostalgia, which these images are conclusively not
immune to). As the last VHS images to appear, they resonate back
through those that came before; the insistent presence of history
is, perhaps, one spell to fight against the disaggregating activity of
the look.
It’s here that the problem of form and content is at its most ur-
gent. Content is our name for what, in an object, whether inten-
tionally artistic or not, can be explained in language. History, in
contrast, demands that we exceed language; consider that it is id-
iomatic to say that a particularly rich historical account “paints a
picture of the past.” To reiterate, any image can become the basis
for a look, but here we see how the presence of history, which goes
beyond form or content, instills a unity that is the mark of style,
and art. One might see nothing but looks in David’s painting of
Belisarius begging, or, closer to our time, Kerry James Marshall’s
School of Beauty, School of Culture. In both cases, this would be
miserably crude. The neoclassical adoption of the forms of antiq-
uity grew out of the conviction that an old dream was finally be-
ing realized, while Marshall aims his outrageous talents at every
gap torn in the tradition of painting by anti-blackness, by chattel
slavery and its wake (his era-defining retrospective was, after all,
rather pointedly titled “Mastry”).
D’Ambrose’s films, sensibly, are more modest in their scale.
Postcards, models of narrative economy and vessels for circulating
images, recur throughout his work, and provide an appealing met-
aphor for its size and mechanics. When Spiral Jetty concludes with
the replacement on a wall of a postcard reproduction of Watteau’s
portrait of Pierrot—a canvas which, like those mentioned above,
both tempts and refuses to be viewed as only the sum of its looks
(i.e., the regalia of commedia dell’arte)—with a photograph we
see being taken in its opening moments, the arc which Notes will
follow appears. Notes opens with a postcard, a “brief hello” from
David to Todd (Poulson) that lays out the cast of characters and
sketches their relationships. The former is returning from a visit
with Madeline (Medel) in Milan, and there is the vague promise of
intrigue between the two young men: “There’s a lot for us to talk
about, too.” This card only arrives at Todd’s apartment near the
film’s completion, some days after David’s death has been con-
firmed, a conceit D’Ambrose first deployed in Six Cents (its spook-
iness reiterating the pun in the film’s title, which the earlier use of
Albert Ayler’s Holy Ghost had pointed towards).
These haunted lags in communication, moments of various
scale in which the time is out of joint, are the most acute form of
D’Ambrose’s key theme, the music of time, or its style. Once heard,
it seems to play everywhere. It’s there in the sense of Notes as a
portrait of a certain segment of the New York film scene today, one
which, like Frampton’s Manual of Arms (1966) or Markopoulos’
Galaxie (1996), is decadent, happy to risk an accusation that it is
“too much.” (Here is perhaps the moment to note that, along with
filmmakers Dan Sallitt and James N. Kienitz Wilkins, two con-
tributors to this magazine appear in the film, while a third is said
to write for it.) And it’s there in the long, long walk that David takes
down a Brooklyn street as he wanders out of the picture follow-
ing the revelation that the man whose reputation he’s been tasked
with managing was, it seems, open to fascism. That there is no
satisfying answer to where he has gone, and how he has ended up
dead in a marsh, is its own sad song, a mystery whose answer is not
in time: Todd’s retracing of his friend’s steps, a repetition which
seems to come from somewhere in the film, rather than from any
reasonable motivation, is a bitter joke on a character whose failure
is, we suspect, tied to his belief in Taubes’ project.
D’Ambrose, for his part, believes unfashionably in art. To re-
turn to his style, I should only like to say that having seen Notes
on an Appearance now six times, I am confident that I could re-
count every one of its nearly 300 shots in sequence. But the har-
mony which, through his precise compositions and his elegant,
gently repetitive chaptered structure, plays in the mind, does not
appear. It is a structure, a form, a style that is always elsewhere,
and which demands our care and attention to flourish; it is the
preciousness of history, an insistence on what counts, an exit
from looks.
31
It is undeniable that the Festival de Cannes, and its artistic direc-
tor Thierry Frémaux, wields a considerable amount of power in
the global film world. If this were not the case, no one would care
that Frémaux seems to have a personal investment in certain me-
diocre filmmakers, such as Paolo Sorrentino, Michel Franco, and
Kornel Mundruczo. But because of the international spotlight that
Cannes shines on these directors and their work, due diligence de-
mands that we reckon with these minor talents on a semi-regular
basis. A kind of resentment builds up, and critics begin to take it as
a personal afront.
When cooler heads prevail, we can recognize that it’s a flaw in
the system, an unjustified elevation of one person’s taste, or the
whims of a small group of sales agents—factors well beyond the
ken of meritocracy, in other words—that create such a situation. A
tiny cabal’s idiosyncrasy becomes the dominant agenda, like it or
not. You can simply look at Cannes’ recent history to see that we
are dealing with inscrutable “gut decisions.” Did anyone honest-
ly believe Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour
(2015) was somehow unfit for Competition? Were all 55 of 2014’s
oicial selections really better than Christian Petzold’s Phoenix?
What to make of the fact that Claire Denis has not had a film in
Competition since Chocolat (1988)? One could go on and on.
KAWASE NAOMI
The Mourning Forest
All of this leads us to the strange case of Japanese auteur
Kawase Naomi. A Cannes regular since her debut feature Suzaku
won the Camera d’Or in 1997, Kawase has become a lightning rod
for everything that is wrong with Cannes in the Frémaux era. She
is viewed as one of the festival’s pets, someone whose career, to all
intents and purposes, has been built by the festival itself. More
troubling, it seems that a simple majority of English-language
critics consider Kawase’s films to be utterly undistinguished, if
not actively bad. (She generally fares somewhat better among
French critics.) In other words, Kawase’s reputation is that of an
auteur created by Frémaux from whole cloth, seemingly to display
Cannes’ ability to discover and nurture developing talent. That
is, the festival validates itself by creating its own in-house brand,
then showing its finds to the waiting world.
Yet the case of Kawase is quite a bit more complicated. First of
all, Kawase had an extensive background in personal documen-
tary prior to making feature films. In this regard, she fits one of
Frémaux’s preferred flavour profiles. (Recently Cannes has sup-
ported other documentarians who have turned to fiction, includ-
ing Sergei Loznitsa, Ulrich Seidl, and Abderramane Sissako.)
But aside from this, Kawase’s development as an artist has been
compromised by her relationship with Cannes. There is an explor-
IN
MEASURED
PRAISE OF
BY MICHAEL SICINSKI
atory energy that animates Kawase’s earliest work, an engage-
ment with both Japanese aesthetics and the history of low-gauge
avant-garde filmmaking. She successfully translated this “poetry
of the ordinary”—what the Japanese call wabi-sabi—into a narra-
tive context with her first two features, Suzaku and Shara (2003).
The increased fixation on narrative patterns eventually drained
Kawase’s films of interest value, transforming her often undisci-
plined lyricism into actual formal incompetence. In particular, it
was with The Mourning Forest (awarded the Grand Prix at Cannes
in 2007) that Kawase truly lost the plot.
***
Suzaku begins in an ordinary family interior, spacious but
rustic. It is defined by soft, muddy lines of brown wood, quite op-
posed to the clean planimetric architecture of Ozu or Mizoguchi.
Kawaze opens the shot with a low f-stop, so at first all we can see
is smoke and fire from a wood-burning stove. Gradually, the room
comes into focus, as though we had walked in from the sunny day
outside and our eyes were still adjusting. Kawase uses moderately
wide angles to display the interiors that characterize so much of
Suzaku, but she composes them at an oblique angle. This permits
composition in depth while maintaining a boxy, enclosed space
against which the open exterior wall (and the blazing sunlight out-
side) is visually striking.
The first half of Suzaku is a kind of panoramic portrait of a
mountain village (near Kawase’s hometown of Nara) that has fall-
en on hard times, and although Kawase focuses on one particular
family, it is only at about the 40-minute mark that the film starts
getting a bit bogged down in generational drama. Until this point,
Suzaku is as much a study of light and landscape as anything else.
Inasmuch as Kawase explores characterization or plot points,
she does so with such a subtle touch that it is possible to miss
certain subtexts.
For example, Kozo, the family patriarch, is a planner working
for the regional transit authority. While he is disappointed that
the local train line he designed has been defunded, it is only to-
ward the end of the film that we learn that he has the sad soul of
a frustrated artist, and that his art—an 8mm movie—looks very
much like an early Kawase film. It depicts flowers standing tall
against the sky, sunlight glinting of of dew-covered branches, and
casual portraits of the village elders. It is, in short, a diary film,
depicting the fleeting moments of ordinary beauty surrounding
Kozo in his daily life.
Kawase’s early films have typically been characterized as docu-
mentaries, and while this is not inaccurate, it is somewhat mislead-
ing. They are personal portraits, both of Kawase herself and of those
around her, dappled with the atmospherics of light and shadow,
landscape and interior. These works fall quite squarely in line with
the diary tradition in North American and European avant-garde
cinema. While the most obvious forebear in this regard is Jonas
Mekas, in her use of the camera as a tool for investigating both do-
mestic spaces and the phenomenal relationships between the body
and nature, early Kawase can be productively cross-referenced with
the work of Helga Fanderl, Ute Aurand, and especially the late Anne
Charlotte Robertson.
At the same time, it is crucial to consider Kawase’s films in the
context of Japanese aesthetic traditions. Even in Suzaku, and es-
pecially in her earlier low-gauge diary filmmaking, Kawase em-
ploys a casual, seemingly ohand approach to composition and
editing, as well as a preference for mise en scène and profilmic
events that display the rustic, the irregular, the picturesque, or in
contemporary design parlance, the “shabby chic.” All of this could
be said to circulate around the infamously cryptic, yet allegedly
simple, Japanese concept of wabi-sabi.
In his aesthetic treatise In Praise of Shadows, novelist Tanizaki
Junichiro explored the concept, along with the related idea of mono
no aware, or the art of impermanence. In describing the somewhat
disheveled architecture of a Japanese bathroom, or the juxtapo-
sition of a ceramic spoon and a steaming bowl of soup, Tanizaki
articulates something akin to what Gilles Deleuze described as
the “formless,” that aesthetic zone of singularity that stabilizes
for only one second and then dissolves, never again drawing undue
attention to itself. It is a plainspoken aesthetic of subtlety.
In Embracing (1992), Kawase operates in this vein, organizing
her shots according to an almost instantaneous formal logic. The
film, which is about Kawase’s search for her biological father, is a
combination of “live” diary segments, mostly comprised of con-
versations with her skeptical grandmother, and a series of recon-
structed memories, mostly derived from old photographs. There
is a handmade, not to say shambolic, quality to several of the
handheld shots as she moves freely about with the camera. And, in
keeping with the general vocabulary of the diaristic avant-garde,
Embracing features cinematic elements that draw attention to the
filmmaking process: rough tape edits, white leader, and skillful yet
amateur in-camera superimpositions.
At the same time, Kawase employs a very deliberate dialectic
between still images and natural motion. She juxtaposes images
from her childhood with a kind of freeform investigation of the
world around her, in particular the immediate landscape of flow-
ers and trees in the rain. Her point is clear: people in the photos
should be moving but are arrested in time, while the “still” flora
waves in the breeze. And, in Kawase’s smartest formal touch, she
returns to particular spaces from her childhood, comparing still
photos from the past with the same spots in the present.
Embracing is a film about dying shadows. It exhibits its concern
with ephemerality in its basic theme of excavating the past. But
more significantly, Kawase’s fixation of ordinary spaces and the
fleeting beauty of the otherwise banal landscape speaks to the
wabi-sabi sensibility. Moreover, the materialist hallmarks we tend
to associate with avant-garde film production, letting the process
show through, is another way in which Kawase gives pride of place
to the rough-hewn, the imperfect, and the irregular.
A similar attitude toward the textures of the everyday can be
seen in The Weald (1997), a feature-length, diary-style documen-
tary. The Weald is notable for being a somewhat more tradition-
al documentary, inasmuch as Kawase’s first-person perspective
is largely absent. Nevertheless, it is a relatively open-form work,
profiling a series of senior citizens living in her hometown of Nara,
one after the other. They are not formally introduced; rather,
Kawase simply meets someone and her camera begins engaging
33
with them, listening to their stories and experiences. The Weald is
one of Kawase’s most intimate films. Nearly three-quarters of the
film is comprised of close-ups, and virtually all of the cinematog-
raphy is handheld. Moreover, there is a tremulous quality to the
images that provides a formalist scrim through which all the film’s
images are received. Whether it is the camera’s purring motor, or
simply Kawase’s unsteady hands, we are continually reminded of
the presence behind the lens.
***
In general, Kawase’s filmmaking has sufered to the extent that
she has tried to combine her loose, indeterminate style with nar-
rative information. Suzaku maintained a great deal of what made
her diary films so rich and distinctive, and her third film, Shara
(2003), Kawase’s first movie in Cannes Competition, is probably
her best film overall. Again filming in her Nara, Kawase adapted
her handheld aesthetic to a particularly apposite theme. Twin
boys are playing outside and one of them mysteriously vanishes,
a sequence Kawase stages in a graceful, perfectly timed follow
shot that may be the finest single piece of filmmaking she has
ever achieved.
As Shara depicts the community coming together to reach out
to these grieving neighbours, pulling them out of their shells and
back into local customs and rituals, Kawase dips back into her
rough-hewn, wabi-sabi observational mode. The rather rigid,
festival-approved formalism of the beginning of the film proves to
be a sign of emotional detachment, whereas Kawase’s looser, in-
formal approach is seen as a sign of healing. Like Suzaku, Shara
displays a logical progression from Kawase’s more experimental
work into story-based filmmaking.
While one still sees the whisper of Kawase’s older work in
her two subsequent features, The Mourning Forest and Hanezu
(2011)—the mountain landscapes of Nara, the sun peering through
the trees, the odd shot of isolated flora—these elements are no
longer the primary building blocks of her formal system. It’s here
that Kawase’s work takes a nosedive. Perhaps the unique pres-
sures of being an anointed “Cannes auteur” drove the director
of-course. Simply put, Kawase begins to play to her weaknesses,
which are conventional storytelling and exposition, leaving her
experimentalism by the wayside.
The earlier features, and especially the experimental works, had
a burnished, lived-in quality, a sturdiness that allowed Kawase
to enter the spaces with only a wisp of a plan—or so the finished
product appeared—and assemble fragments into temporary but
poetically satisfying wholes. The Mourning Forest, by contrast, is a
plodding afair, overdetermined by a semi-mythological narrative
and an allegorized journey that simultaneously emphasizes char-
acter and evacuates it. A tale of an elderly man (Uda Shigeki) and
his caregiver (Ono Machiko) lost in a forest, both coping with loss
and mortality, the film is once again characterized by Kawase’s
preference for handheld cinematography and uncomposed angles.
However, what is lithe and surprising in one context is clunky and
graceless in another. The Mourning Forest operates like a conven-
tional art film, and so Kawase’s wabi-sabi/mono no aware style
resembles incompetence here. (Of course, considering the film’s
Cannes award, not everyone agrees.)
34
Hanezu is arguably even worse. A film that is intended to
function on both an individual and a mythological level, it is so
ham-fisted as to announce in a prologue that this is how it is in-
tended to operate. Set in the village of Asuka and based on the
legends of that area’s mountain gods, Hanezu is fundamentally a
middle-aged love triangle. Kayoko (Ohshima Hako) is a dye art-
ist, working chiefly in the colour red. She lives with her boyfriend
Tetsuya (Akikawa Tetsuya), who is a publisher. All is well until
Kayoko’s old acquaintance Takumi (Komizu Tota), a woodwork-
er, shows up. Kayoko and Takumi have an afair, and Kayoko
becomes pregnant.
What is maddening about Hanezu is that Kawase is barely ca-
pable of imparting this very simple narrative information in ei-
ther a linear fashion or through a logically fragmented, modernist
tesseract. People and actions just float across the screen, provid-
ing no sense that anything or anyone is uniquely worthy of our
attention. Hanezu is possibly the least “directed” film imaginable,
certainly from a major international auteur. But Kawase has not
compensated by making Hanezu an avant-garde return to form.
One could almost make a case for Hanezu as a sort of Buddhist ex-
periment in cinematic emptying, since it has all the apparent sig-
nifiers of a narrative film without actually conveying anything. It
just hovers like a miasma.
It’s disheartening to see a promising artist stuck in neutral, and
with her next film, Kawase didn’t exactly break out of the slump,
but did make a bold new move in any case. Still the Water (2014)
was a film with a lot riding on it, and Kawase even went so far as to
announce to the press that it was her “masterpiece,” rather akin
to Babe Ruth pointing to the bleachers before his swing. Response
was tepid, but looking back, one can see Kawase’s two primary ten-
dencies battling it out to some degree.
Once again attempting to articulate a human-centred narrative
with goings-on at the mythic or spiritual level, Still the Water ex-
amines life for two young kids (Murakami Nijiro and Yoshinaga
Jun) growing up in an island community. One boy discovers a dead
body and must come to terms with this trauma. (The adult investi-
gation into her identity goes on in the background.) Swapping her
trademark landscape imagery for deep aquatic rapture, Kawase
mirrors the kids’ experience with the tides and the turbulence of
the surrounding sea, providing many opportunities to explore the
pure glissando of light on rushing water.
Hardly a masterpiece, Still the Water nevertheless demonstrat-
ed a clear command of narrative material and, like Shara, extend-
ed Kawase’s core interest in tradition and ritual, particularly
as it represents a healing power for those in pain and isolation.
However, the experimental touches never quite convince. This is
Kawase’s most “professional” arthouse film, even if a relatively
undistinguished example of the species. At this point, Kawase’s
Cannes-formation is complete.
***
The festival actually chose not to put Kawase’s next feature,
An (aka Sweet Bean, 2015) in competition, “demoting” her to the
opening slot of Un Certain Regard. Easily Kawase’s most accessi-
ble film, An also, ironically, takes her most directly back to her doc-
umentary roots, although that isn’t apparent until its conclusion.

The film features the legendary Kiki Kirin as Tokue, an elderly
woman who is a master baker of an, a confectionary sweet-bean
paste pancake that is sold by street vendors in Japan. She ofers to
help a struggling an vendor (Nagase Masatoshi) improve his sub-
standard product, and everything is going well until word gets out
that Tokue lives in the local home for lepers.
Kawase takes the opportunity to insinuate Kiki into an actual
assisted-living community for lepers, most of whom have lived
there their entire lives. Much like Suzaku’s pause for an impromp-
tu bit of avant-garde portraiture, An makes space for a reasonably
unstructured mini-documentary about the forcible separation
of lepers from the mainstream of Japanese society, told mostly
through a focus on individual elders. In its saturation in shad-
ow, the plain wooden interiors, and the lack of forward propul-
sion, this segment of An seems “disorganized” but actually just
drifts, particularly in contrast to the highly accessible narrative
through-line. It is a bit of mono no aware in the midst of a satisfy-
ingly commercial film in the vein of recent Kore-eda.
This brings us to Radiance (2017), a film that, while not exactly
a return to form, is certainly Kawase’s best feature since Shara.
As with her earliest fictional films, Radiance displays a strong the-
matic component that allows Kawase to explore her more abstract
interests. At the same time, Radiance is not bogged down with the
sorts of grandiose, mythic conceits that seem to play to her for-
mal weaknesses. Radiance is, in the simplest sense, a film about
encroaching blindness, in particular how it afects renowned pho-
tographer Nagase (Nakamori Masaya) and his relation to the larg-
er world. He is one of a group of blind or near-blind auditors who
belongs to a museum film society, where they evaluate the verbal
captioning for various films provided by members of the staf.
One such description-writer is Misaki (Osaki Misako), a wom-
an who takes her craft very seriously. She is struggling to provide
descriptive narration for a rather abstruse art film—it resembles
Still the Water
certain works of Kim Ki-duk, such as Time (2006)—and while the
group generally has a tepid response to her prose, it’s Nagase who
delivers a blistering critique. In time, Misaki and Nagase become
tentative friends, and the photographer loses what’s left of his
eyesight. Through their relationship, Misaki is able to see the film
diferently, as more than just a visual experience, and eventually
finds the words to translate that experience for the blind.
But Radiance is really about the impossibility of translating
visual experience through words, or vice versa. Despite the fact
that the film has a relatively strong narrative trajectory, Kawase
frequently interrupts that motion with piercing white and yellow
light, showstopping efects that force the viewer to respond on a
diferent plane altogether. Similarly, as Nagase continues taking
photographs despite his failing eyesight, we are asked to look at
the diegetic world as a set of purely formal relationships. Whereas
a blurry image is no good for narrative cinema, since valuable in-
formation cannot be properly conveyed, Kawase provides a sec-
ond, equal means of looking at the profilmic event, as a series of
shadows hovering on the verge of Being.
Radiance does not revive the wabi-sabi approach of Kawase’s
early films. A work of spare poetry and ambiance, such as the
glorious ten-minute film haiku See Heaven (1995), is unlikely to
grace her filmography again. However, Kawase has discovered
new techniques whereby she can infuse her narrative cinema with
explorations of the purest materials of the medium: light, shadow,
and motion. She seems to have found her mature voice, which is
not always easy on an international festival circuit infamous for
external pressures and demands. Her salad days behind her, and
having found her way out of the forest, Kawase’s most compelling
work should be on the horizon. (Her upcoming film Touch, starring
Juliette Binoche and surely headed for Cannes, will certainly pro-
vide yet another new direction.) But time will tell. As we know, the
only true constant is impermanence.
35
THE
MISTRESS
OF SUSPENSE
Daphne du Maurier and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca
BY ALICIA FLETCHER
Taking the lead of the film’s maker, the vast majority of critics writ-
ing about Phantom Thread have dutifully remarked upon the similar-
ities between Paul Thomas Anderson’s film and Alfred Hitchcock’s
first American picture Rebecca (1940), overlaying the triangle of
dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis), his young live-
in lover Alma (Vicky Krieps), and Woodcock’s imperious sister Cyril
(Lesley Manville) over that of brooding aristocrat Maxim de Winter
(Laurence Olivier), his naïve second wife (Joan Fontaine), and the
demonic housekeeper Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), whose mad
devotion to Maxim’s dead first wife Rebecca leads her to try and
drive the new Mrs. de Winter to suicide. But while Anderson’s open-
ly invited comparison has predictably inspired musings on the film’s
greater or lesser Hitchcockianness—particularly as the plot comes
to turn upon a slight case of domestic poisoning, which also parallels
the Master of Suspense’s Suspicion (1941) and Notorious (1946)—per-
haps we would do better to trace Phantom Thread further back, to
its true genesis: Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel of Rebecca, which
Hitchcock adapted with a fidelity that was truly unusual for him.
Given that Hitchcock is the most studied filmmaker in the medi-
um’s history, it’s remarkable that even knowing all we do about the
extent of his collaborations—with his wife and frequently uncred-
ited scenarist Alma Reville as well as such strong screenwriters
as Charles Bennett, Ben Hecht, John Michael Hayes, and Ernest
Lehman, not to mention superstar scribes like Robert E. Sherwood,
Thornton Wilder, John Steinbeck, Raymond Chandler, and Anthony
Shafer—he remains so bound up with the idea of cinematic author-
ship that it is virtually impossible to view any of his films as anything
other than “his.” (Hitchcock has only a single oicial writing credit to
his name, for the silent 1927 melodrama The Ring.) It’s thus fascinat-
ing, in sifting through the correspondence between Hitchcock and
producer David O. Selznick about Rebecca (contained in the Selznick
papers housed at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas), to see
the power imbalance between the filmmaker and the author of the
film’s source novel. What we see in these memos is Hitchcock’s initial
attempt to eface du Maurier’s influence from the film as much as pos-
sible, and ultimate concession to the author’s narrative design. Yet al-
though Rebecca is perhaps the most faithful adaptation of a literary
source that Hitchcock ever made, it also contains the seeds of much
of what we would come to think of as “Hitchcock”—themes, motifs,
and obsessions that also run throughout the work of du Maurier, who,
like Hitchcock, spent the majority of her career being dismissed as a
popular entertainer rather than an artist.
Born in 1907, eight years after the future filmmaker, du Maurier
was something of a not-so-secret sharer to Hitchcock through-
out his career: her books provided the sources for his last British
(Jamaica Inn, 1939) and first American (Rebecca) films, and his adap-
tation of her novelette The Birds efectively closed out his “classical
Hollywood” period in 1963. Indeed, the pair’s paths had crossed even
before du Maurier was a published author: as du Maurier recount-
ed in her memoirs, in the ’20s the notorious prankster Hitchcock
found a worthy adversary, fellow rogue, and longtime friend in du
Maurier’s father Gerald, a theatre impresario and sometime silent
actor. While the two would not collaborate directly, Hitchcock pro-
duced Lord Camber’s Ladies (1932), a film version of one of the elder
du Maurier’s greatest stage successes, and one of the venerable actor-
manager’s last film appearances before his death in 1934.
The year before Lord Camber’s Ladies Daphne du Maurier had
published her first novel, The Loving Spirit, at the age of 24, her pre-
cocious debut aided at least in part by her family’s longstanding con-
nections to London’s theatrical and publishing circles. (Gerald was
not the first famous du Maurier: his father George was the author
of the phenomenally successful Trilby, the novel that introduced
Svengali as both character and trope, and which was adapted to the
screen several times.) Du Maurier had her first real popular success
with Jamaica Inn in 1936, but her next novel, Rebecca—which was
first published in 1938 and has never been out of print since—was a
bona fide sensation. Written while du Maurier was stationed with
her army oicer husband in Alexandria, Rebecca had a pronounced
autobiographical basis. Pregnant and questioning her marriage,
du Maurier was overwhelmed by her responsibility to manage the
servants and domestic workers, feeling that she was unable to wield
any authority over them. In Mrs. Danvers, du Maurier created a
monstrous projection of her domestic frustration, even as the sin-
ister housekeeper’s pathological hatred of her beloved Rebecca’s
successor expressed du Maurier’s own jealousy of her husband’s
first fiancée, the sultry Jeanette Ricardo, who would commit su-
icide by throwing herself under a train a few years after Rebecca
was published. (Perhaps due to his closeness with the du Mauriers,
Hitchcock seemed to recognize the autobiographical nature of
Rebecca: on set, instead of calling Fontaine’s character “the second
Mrs. de Winter,” Hitchcock, whether afectionately or not, referred
to her as “Daphne.”)
Danvers, or “Danny,” as she is suggestively nicknamed, also con-
nects to du Maurier’s now well-known bisexuality (though it is still
adamantly denied by her descendants). A tomboy as a child—pos-
sibly due, at least in part, to a desire to assuage her beloved father’s
disappointment over not having a son—du Maurier often dressed
as a boy in adolescence and in trousers and men’s clothing in adult-
hood, and was reputed to have had a sexual obsession (and possible
afairs) with the actress Gertrude Lawrence (who starred alongside
du Maurier’s father in Lord Camber’s Ladies) and her publisher’s wife,
Ellen Doubleday. A recently discovered, previously unpublished
story that du Maurier wrote at age 21, “The Doll”—about a woman’s
obsession with a mechanical sex toy—is the earliest example of the
fascination with dark, “displaced” sexuality that runs through-
out her work. While Mrs. Danvers will always remain du Maurier’s
most famous psychosexual monster, it is in the 1951 novel My Cousin
Rachel—with its scheming, BDSM-enthusiast anti-heroine who,
like her predecessor Rebecca, is eventually punished for her unto-
ward sexual behaviour —that the author most fully explores her re-
curring themes of sexual transgression. (A decade after his success
with Rebecca, Selznick desperately attempted to secure the rights to
My Cousin Rachel, sending a series of almost threatening memos to
du Maurier’s literary agent; he lost out to 20th Century Fox, which
released a film version a year later with Olivia de Havilland and
Richard Burton.)
37
 While Rebecca was derided by critics as nothing more than a ro-
mance novel for bored housewives, the book became an instant
bestseller, and in 1940 du Maurier adapted it into a successful stage
production, which premiered on the London stage a month be-
fore the release of Hitchcock and Selznick’s film version in the US.
Though that film would provide Hitchcock his entrée to Hollywood,
he had had his eye on the property since 1937, when the novel was
still in galleys. Unable to secure an advance deal with du Maurier at
that time, Hitchcock—at the urging of his friend Charles Laughton
and former UFA producer Erich Pommer, who had founded a pro-
duction company with the actor—instead signed on in 1939 to di-
rect an adaptation of du Maurier’s period suspenser/swashbuckler
Jamaica Inn as a star vehicle for Laughton and his young protégée
Maureen O’Hara.
While Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn proved profitable at the box of-
fice, it was regarded, then as now, as one of the director’s worst
films. Hitchcock all but disavowed it prior to its release, having de-
termined while still in production that it was an overblown, over-
wrought shipwreck of a film—which he partly attributed to the ego of
star and co-producer Laughton, who, as Hitchcock later described it
to François Trufaut, so overthought every single aspect of his bom-
bastic performance that he was virtually impossible to direct. Du
Maurier was in agreement with Hitchcock on the film’s failures, par-
ticularly the numerous changes Laughton and Pommer had made
to the source material; in fact, she was so despondent with this first
experience of a screen adaptation of her work that she nearly termi-
nated her talks with Selznick and Hitchcock about their optioning
of Rebecca. (The novel had already been adapted to radio in 1938
by Orson Welles for his Mercury Theatre on the Air successor The
Campbell Playhouse, with Welles as Maxim de Winter and Margaret
Sullavan as the second Mrs. de Winter; future Hitchcock collabora-
tor Bernard Herrmann provided the score, and would later reuse his
orchestration for the Welles-starring 1943 version of the Rebecca
predecessor/model Jane Eyre.)
As the Selznick-Hitchcock correspondence reveals, du Maurier was
perhaps more justified than she knew in her fear that the filmmakers
would once again tamper with her work. In a memo to Hitchcock dat-
ed June 1939, Selznick expresses “shock” and concern at the director’s
first script treatment, which “punched up” the narrative with come-
dic aspects not present in du Maurier’s brooding novel; he had also
added questionable flashback scenes that revealed Rebecca, which
entirely defeated the purpose of du Maurier’s innovative narrative
strategy whereby the first Mrs. de Winter is present only through the
recollections of others. As with his long-gestating production of Gone
With the Wind (which was then in its last month of principal photogra-
phy), Selznick put a premium on sticking as close to the narrative of
a massively popular literary property as possible: what was the point
of shelling out so much for du Maurier’s book, he queries of his direc-
tor, if Hitchcock insisted on creating his own text? Unsurprisingly,
the producer doesn’t hold back in his memos to Hitchcock, strongly
cautioning cum demanding that his fêted new recruit toe the line and
honour the book he had poured so much of his studio’s resources into.
With no leg to stand on, Hitchcock acquiesced to Selznick’s
demands, sticking as close to the page as possible, right down
38
to dialogue lifted verbatim from the novel. The one significant
change made to the story derived from another source entire-
ly: the Production Code Administration, whose provision that
no crime could be seen to go unpunished necessitated a revision
of the story’s central event. In du Maurier’s novel, the flagrantly
adulterous Rebecca—having just discovered that she is incapable
of having children and, moreover, that she will soon die from an
incurable cancer—goaded Maxim into murdering her by taunt-
ing him with the (fake) news that she was pregnant with another
man’s child. In the film, the almost-murderous Maxim is spared
the need to follow through when Rebecca “stumbles” and dies by
knocking her head against a convenient anchor; convinced that no
one will believe his story, he then stages her death as the result of a
boating accident.
However, what Maxim’s PCA-demanded innocence most alters
in the tenor of du Maurier’s tale is the reaction of his young bride
to this revelation. In the film, the heroine is relieved to discover
that her husband is innocent of murder; in the book, she is relieved
to discover that Maxim never loved Rebecca, and is remarkably
untroubled by the fact that he did her in. It’s this quite stunning
yet seemingly guileless perversity that transforms du Maurier’s
Rebecca—with its obsessive focus on jealousy, subversive sexu-
al arousal, and anxiety surrounding matrimonial inferiority—
from comforting, housewife-pleasing romance into some kind of
female-centred domestic horror story. The dismissive reviewers
of the time had failed to recognize du Maurier’s true intention: a
first-person examination of the relationship between a powerful,
at times sadistic man and a vulnerable, disenfranchised woman,
committed to him despite his veiled cruelty. In her need to please
her husband and “earn” his love, du Maurier’s heroine is diferently
but no less twisted than Phantom Thread’s Alma, with her buttery
mushroom omelettes.
For his part, Hitchcock, as evidenced in the memos to Selznick,
was all for keeping Rebecca’s death an act of unmitigated murder—
and, more importantly, one can see throughout his subsequent work
a fascination with the kind of sickly, codependent relationship at the
centre of du Maurier’s story. While he would shuck of du Maurier’s
essentially 19th-century Gothic trappings, a remarkable number
of Hitchcock’s films over the next two decades plus returned to the
kind of bad romance we see between Maxim and his mousy, maso-
chistic young paramour: Suspicion, with Joan Fontaine anxiously (or
longingly?) awaiting her uxoricide at the hands of her abusive play-
boy husband Cary Grant; Ingrid Bergman’s instant falling for am-
nesiac (and possible murderer) Gregory Peck in Spellbound (1945);
Grant and Bergman’s hate-fucking afair in Notorious; Bergman’s
alcoholic devotion to her brutal ex-con husband Joseph Cotten in
Under Capricorn (1949); James Stewart’s necrophilic longing for the
creepily willing Kim Novak in Vertigo (1958); the blackmailed union
between klepto Tippi Hedren and smirking armchair psychoanalyst
Sean Connery in Marnie (1964). If “Hitchcock” is now inseparable
from the very idea of cinema itself, it’s entirely justifiable to ask how
much of this interpersonal dynamic—his fascination with which
was so central to his work—derived from du Maurier’s preceding
plunge into the psychosexual depths of a woman in trouble.
 Let England Shake
Mick Jackson’s Threads and the Imagination of Disaster
BY ADAM NAYMAN
The United States was not attacked by the nuclear arsenal of
North Korea on January 13, 2018, but it is a date that will live in
infamy all the same. “THIS IS NOT A DRILL” read an unsigned
emergency message claiming that ballistic missiles were “inbound
to Hawaii”; many of the Aloha State’s residents had the warning
beamed directly to their cell phones. It took less than 30 min-
utes for authorities to conclude that this apocalypse-now alert
had been a mistake, a false alarm caused by an employee who had
“pressed the wrong button” before clocking out. The wording of
the explanation was worthy of a classic Simpsons episode; you may
recall that power-plant safety technician Homer once prevented
a meltdown by playing eenie-meenie-miney-moe with his key-
board. (D’oh!)
But in light of the current US president’s fiery rhetoric about
weapons of mass destruction—specifically, his willingness to use
them at the drop of a Tweet—the Hawaiian snafu was much scar-
ier than it was silly. Pressing the wrong button is one thing; imag-
ining a stubby little orange finger poised over the right one is the
stuf of nightmares. Grotesque times call for a grotesque mindset:
it’s all so horrible that you just have to laugh. In the hours after
the non-attack, my Twitter feed was predictably swamped with
jokes, GIFs, and memes drawing upon the cinematic representa-
tion of nuclear war and its aftermath: Slim Pickens’ 20-megaton
rodeo ride in Dr. Strangelove (1964); Linda Hamilton’s irradiat-
ed daydream from Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991); Charlton
Heston on the beach in Planet of the Apes (1968); Gregory Peck on
the beach in On the Beach (1961); even the black-and-white CGI
mushroom cloud spewed forth in the eighth episode of Twin Peaks:
The Return (2017). There were also several shout-outs to Martin
Sheen’s proto-Trumpian prez in The Dead Zone (1983) greeting his
concerned national security advisors with an ohandedly messi-
anic “the missiles are flying, Hallelujah”—a line reading that will
persist longer than any of Good President Sheen’s well-meaning
pronouncements on The West Wing.
This inventory of fictitious blasts and their aftermath was all
in good fun—the social-media equivalent of whistling in the dark,
trying to reconcile collective anxiety with communal cinephilia.
And yet I also felt a chill while scrolling through my timeline. In
“The Imagination of Disaster,” Susan Sontag weighed the “incon-
ceivable terror” of the Cold War against the tendency of fantasy—
summed up for her purposes by period sci-fi of the cheesy, cheap-
jack (Arnold) vein—to both productively and problematically
normalize these anxieties. “These films reflect world-wide anxie-
ties, and they serve to allay them,” wrote Sontag. “They inculcate a
39
strange apathy concerning the processes of radiation, contamina-
tion, and destruction that I for one find haunting and depressing.”
Sontag was writing in 1965, the same year that Peter Watkins
released The War Game—a film that inverts her formulation, turn-
ing the processes she describes (including apathy) into sources of
inconceivable terror. Whenever I teach The War Game in my doc-
umentary course at Toronto’s Ryerson University, students are
startled both by the grimness of its content—summed up in the
not-so-rhetorical question it asks about whether the survivors of
a nuclear war would envy the dead—but also its canny exploita-
tion of the docudrama format. Watkins was not the first film-
maker to booby-trap putatively non-fictional work, but the way
he weaponizes The War Game’s presentation is truly remarkable.
By applying the visual language of re-creation to things to come
(a prophecy no less unsettling for not coming true 50 years after
the fact), he melds speculation with spectacle: the line between
rigorous thought experiment and cheapjack exploitation doesn’t
vanish, but keeps moving all over the place. “Too horrifying for the
medium of broadcasting,” was the BBC’s rationale for withholding
the finished product from their viewers. In a typically pugnacious
essay on his website, Watkins (whose preferred mode is the self-
interview) insists that the BBC’s suppression of The War Game
was about more than standards and practices. “These episodes,”
he writes, “expose the primitive and almost desperate extent to
which TV organizations will go to defend their hierarchical power
regarding what the public sees…[and] the usage of the rationale of
‘artistic failure,’ which TV organizations are fully prepared to use
in order to suppress or marginalize films which they do not want
the public to see.”
The War Game’s impact derived partially from its formal dif-
ference from, and also basic proximity to, previous American
treatments of similar material. The irradiated ’50s monsters de-
rided by Sontag had also been accompanied by more sober, if still
low-budget, attempts to imagine the disasters of a nuclear apoc-
alypse, including Arch Oboler’s Five (1951), Ranald MacDougall’s
The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959), Ray Milland’s Panic in
Year Zero! (1962), and a clutch of episodes from the anthology se-
ries The Twilight Zone (1959-64) and The Outer Limits (1963-65).
By the early ’60s, more “serious” (i.e., bigger-budgeted) eforts
entered the mix. In addition to Dr. Strangelove and its glibly bril-
liant channelling of liberal outrage into flip nihilism (Pauline Kael
wasn’t exactly wrong when she said the film’s ultimate upshot was
to make its audience literally stop worrying and love the bomb),
there was also Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe (1964)—a laughless ver-
sion of Strangelove in which President Henry Fonda mans up and
nukes NYC to make up for the accidental destruction of Moscow
due to a Strategic Air Command computer error—and James B.
Harris’ The Bedford Incident (1965), a seaborne Fail-Safe in which
autocratic naval commander Richard Widmark goes down (or
rather up) with the ship when his pursuit of a Soviet submarine
leads to an unintended exchange of nuclear warheads.
By the ’70s, nuclear war had migrated pretty definitively into the
realm of genre cinema, with an emphasis on post-apocalyptic
landscapes, from The Omega Man (1973) to A Boy and His Dog
(1975) to Mad Max (1979), which, more than any other film, estab-
40
lished the dusty wasteland template that would become de rigueur.
Steven Spielberg got in on the act with Raiders of the Lost Ark
(1981) and its barely disguised replay of The Big One as a manifes-
tation of God’s wrath against the Nazis—an allusion doubled down
on a quarter-century later in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of
the Crystal Skull’s visualization of Harrison Ford’s whip-cracking
hero accidentally stumbling into Ground Zero at the Atomic Café.
But the more that Captain Ron kept eyeballing the Evil Empire
to the East throughout the ’80s, the more that artists in a variety of
mediums sought to eschew escapism, to rediscover the horror of a
terribly real threat that had been domesticated by popular culture.
Perhaps the most brilliant and audacious attempt was Alan Moore
and Dave Gibbons’ celebrated graphic novel Watchmen (1986-87),
which boldly fused the realms of the real and the fictional in its
vision of a superhero-populated world where the colourfully cos-
tumed crimefighters are revealed to be utterly impotent in the face
of Armageddon. In the series’ conceptual masterstroke, nuclear
war is only staved of via a phony (yet still terrifyingly fatal) al-
ien invasion that unites the US and the USSR in common cause—
which is both an homage to/rip-of of the vintage Outer Limits ep-
isode “The Architects of Fear” (1963) and a sly suggestion that, no
matter how seriously we attempt to conceive of our potential spe-
cies extinction, we are perhaps inevitably driven back to the cues,
clichés, and precedents of pop culture. (Was it not for this very
reason that Kubrick, at the height of Cold War tensions, chucked
his initial attempt at a grimly prescient nuclear-war drama and
opted instead for the nightmarish sketch-comedy repartee and
vaudeville bufoonery of Strangelove?)
Nevertheless, and perhaps understandably, dogged and dour
realism remained the default mode for the ’80s spate of nuclear-
anxiety films, including the 1983 double strike of Lynne Littman’s
underseen Testament—a fable of communal endurance organized
around a Pied Piper motif (subsequently pilfered by Atom Egoyan
for The Sweet Hereafter [1997])—to the ABC television movie The
Day After, the latter of which was Event Television of the first or-
der, drawing an astonishing 100 million viewers. Viewed 35 years
later, The Day After feels dated in a way that goes beyond its cast
of familiar faces (including Jason Robards, JoBeth Williams, John
Lithgow, and a pre-Police Academy Steve Guttenberg) and ques-
tionable special efects. Throughout this purportedly unvarnished
attempt to render the reality of nuclear war and its aftermath,
there is a palpable attempt to embed some kernel of hope—which
director Nicholas Meyer, just coming of the deliriously enjoyable
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) with its pop-metaphysics
of rebirth, is all too eager to play up—and in the end the film suc-
cumbs to the tidy narrative wrap-ups of clearly defined character
arcs and redemptive humanism.
The same cannot be said of Mick Jackson’s 1984 BBC film
Threads (just released on Blu-ray in a gleaming new 2K restora-
tion by Severin Films), a UK counterpart to The Day After—echo-
ing that film’s narrative structure by using a small group of protag-
onists to anchor its panoramic vision of the end of the world—and
a spiritual sequel to The War Game, from which it borrows its
chillingly matter-of-fact voiceover and sober, journalistic tone.
(That Threads would not exist without The War Game is a simple
matter of fact: the BBC’s then Director-General Alasdair Milne,
whose fondness for format-busting TV dated back to the scathing,
proto-Daily Show satirical news program That Was the Week That
Was in 1962, watched the Watkins film and immediately demand-
ed a companion piece.) The script by Barry Hines is a mix of nat-
uralism and metaphor, weaving together the class politics you’d
expect from the writer of Kes (1969) with anxious, ticking-clock
suspense. The central couple, Jimmy and Ruth (Reece Dinsdale
and Karen Meagher), are a study in contrasts: he’s from a coun-
cil estate, she lives in a nice flat in town. As the film opens they’re
about to have a baby, a blessed event that brings their two families
together as the televisions around them blare the run-up to some
kind of cataclysmic East-vs.-West conflict. These broadcasts are
the only source of sociopolitical exposition in the film; Hines and
Jackson focus on civilian life—pub crawls haunted by the dim, fa-
talistic acknowledgment that something terrible might happen
any day now—and the eforts of small groups of defence workers
to monitor the situation, futilely fulfilling their institutional roles
without making much of a diference on the preparedness of those
around them.
In interviews, Jackson has described the scuttled plan to use
stars from the long-running soap opera Coronation Street as the
principal actors in Threads—a potentially audacious move that
would have confronted a British audience with the spectacle of
their favourite television personalities melting before their eyes.
However, that kind of intertextuality would have perhaps dis-
astrously unbalanced a movie whose aims are purely visceral.
(Jackson’s sole concession to postmodern gamesmanship—and
his only joke—is an insert of an E.T. doll being incinerated in a
horrific mid-film montage, comforting Hollywood fantasy going
up in flames along with everything else.) If anything, it is Threads’
anonymous casting and scrappy, low-budget look (it reportedly
cost less than £300,000) that vouchsafes its credibility, especially
in the grimly picaresque second half: a methodical atrocity exhi-
bition of burned bodies, broken social systems, and, following a
flash-forward of several years that paradoxically seems to take the
action back in time, the de-evolution of spoken language to primi-
tive utterances. The sun, long since blotted out by ash, finally sets
on the British Empire once and for all.
The neo-medievalism of the final scenes, which ironically pre-
sents England’s class distinctions as finally levelled (along with
the rest of the countryside), perches right on the edge of Monty
Pythonesque absurdity with its scenes of semi-feral survivors roil-
ing about in lovely filth. (Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg seemed to
be kidding Threads a bit in the coda to their 2013 jape The World’s
End.) Still, Jackson’s film stands proudly alongside The War Game
in that small category of works whose principled bleakness resists
and withstands parody. Both Meyer and Jackson spoke about the
importance of their films being seen by people in power, and the
potential impacts they could make on the politics of disarmament
(by 1987, even Superman was on the case in The Quest for Peace),
but where The Day After now feels like a PSA, Threads is too thor-
oughly fatalistic to be reduced to that category. What makes it
frightening, and enduring, is how it so vividly illustrates the idea
that civilization is ultimately predicated not on idealism or ide-
ologies, but a set of contingencies that can come unravelled in an
instant. Its vision of disaster is definitive because it leaves so little
to the imagination.
41
 Standard Gauge

Let Art For Morgan Fisher, Another Movie is anything but another mov-
ie. The result of a decades-long reconsideration of the art and

Flourish, persona of Bruce Conner, Fisher’s first new film in 15 years at-
tempts to reckon with a work of such time-honoured merit that
its mere existence feel courageous. Conner’s epochal debut A

Let the Movie (1958), a 12-minute montage of disaster-related found

footage set to Ottorino Respighi’s Pines of Rome, simultane-
ously crystallized a genre and incited what is now recognized

World Perish as the second generation of the postwar American avant-gar-

Morgan Fisher on Another Movie
BY JORDAN CRONK
de, to which Fisher’s first decade of meta-materialist film work
both epitomizes and deconstructs movie-by-movie, method-
by-method.
“The motif of fascism in A Movie is very pronounced,” Fisher
would say in a 1983 interview (published in 1987) with Film
Quarterly, as he was beginning work on his own seminal ex-
periment with found footage, the personal-poetic watershed
Standard Gauge (1984), a portion of which is dedicated to a
serendipitous encounter with a piece of discarded celluloid re-
lated to one of A Movie’s most recognizable visual motifs: the
Hindenburg. “People must realize what it is they’re responding
to and don’t want to face it in the film because it means having
to face it themselves,” he continued. “[A Movie] is haunted by a
kind of dreadful euphoria.”
It is from this theoretical base that Another Movie can be
understood as both a belated response to Conner’s aesthetic

42
spectacle and a reclamation of Respighi’s music. In Conner’s
hands, Pines of Rome, reduced by almost ten minutes to accom-
pany his dazzlingly destructive image track, became, in a sense,
cinema’s quintessential aural accoutrement: opulent, rousing,
and versatile—though this versatility is something only Conner
seemed capable of fully exploiting. As a piece of program music,
Pines of Rome is meant to describe a series of scenes related to
Roman military glory, which Conner set aside in favor of adapt-
ing the more extravagant elements of the score to his collage of
careening cars, mushroom clouds, and downed dirigibles. Fully
resurrected, Respighi’s 1924 tone poem for orchestra is given
pride of place in Fisher’s bold reimagining, which allows the
three movements first utilized by Conner to play out in full over
a black screen, while the omitted passage is set to a gorgeous
black-and-white image of the moon (the first piece of original
footage shot and released by Fisher in over 30 years) moving
across an Italian hillside—a simple but striking visualization of
Respighi’s original scenario.
Both something new and vaguely familiar for the 76-year-
old Fisher, Another Movie proceeds along similarly conceptual,
if less functionally transparent, lines as the early structuralist
landmarks Production Stills (1970) and Picture and Sound Rushes
(1973), while the spirit of rehabilitation that animates the pro-
ject continues an initiative that has largely defined the second
phase of Fisher’s career, beginning in 1984 with Standard Gauge
and continuing, after an appropriately prolonged pause, with
the intrepid insert-shot compendium ( ) (2003). As mercurial
as he is methodical, Fisher’s devout but complicated fascination
with his subjects never betrays his eternally mischievousness
and self-deprecating demeanour. Considering his infrequent
work rate, even the film’s title, when seen in the opening cred-
its (Another Movie…by Morgan Fisher), can’t help but elicit a
chuckle. A critique by design, Another Movie’s nocturnal aura
and elegiac tone suggest it may, for Fisher, represent something
altogether simpler: a coda.
Cinema Scope: Bruce Conner is not necessarily the first film-
maker one might think of when watching your work, and yet he’s
been a fairly consistent presence in both your films and in state-
ments you’ve made over the years. What’s your history with
Conner, whether with his work or as a person?
Morgan Fisher: The first work of his that I saw was A Movie.
That film came out in 1958, and it had a tremendous impact at
the time. I probably saw it for the first time in the early ’60s. I
can’t imagine that there was anyone who saw it then who wasn’t
afected by it. I certainly was, and it’s always stayed with me.
But what’s happened over the years is that my attitude toward
Conner’s film evolved. I think my attitude at the time was…
veneration is too strong a word, but maybe admiration—awe,
almost, because it’s such a powerful film. I was fascinated by it,
but I don’t think fascination is necessarily a good thing, because
fascination implies a kind of helplessness. With the passing of
time I came to understand that it was possible to take an atti-
tude toward the film that could be called critical, and that was
the beginning of Another Movie. One way to think about this
film is as a sign of my having finally escaped from this admira-
tion, or awe, or fascination.
I got the idea for the film at least 20 years ago, maybe longer.
As it first came to me the idea was a very simple one, and that
was to include the music that Conner’s film omitted. It was in
the spirit of a corrective. So it would be all of Respighi’s score,
not just part of it. And I think that would do two things: first, it
would point to the fact that Conner omitted part of the music,
raising a question about why he did. And second, it would re-
cover, so to speak, Respighi’s music, in that you would hear it
in the way that Respighi wanted you to hear it. Pines of Rome
is a piece of program music that describes four scenes, and
Respighi wrote out the four scenes that he wanted each move-
ment to describe. So my movie begins with those descriptions,
telling you what Respighi wanted the music to depict, which of
course is very, very diferent from the images Conner put to that
same music.
More recently I’ve come to understand that A Movie has
the efect of raising questions about Respighi’s music, because
while Respighi gave his descriptions of the scenes, it’s disturb-
ing how apposite that same music is to scenes in Conner’s film
that are so totally diferent than the descriptions. And I think
that says something about Respighi’s music that I could say…
raises a problem.
I heard Conner speak and present his films a couple of times,
and I found the last time problematic. He began by playing the
harmonica, telling us that he knew we would put up with his
playing for as long as he wanted because that was the only way
we would get to see the films. So he was telling us that he knew
he had the power to impose on us, which I thought this was a
little strange.
At an earlier screening he described how on John F.
Kennedy’s birthday, the first birthday after he was assassinat-
ed, that he, Bruce Conner, was the only person standing outside
the house in Brookline, Massachusetts, where Kennedy was
born. At the time I was struck by this, and it took me a very long
time to understand the significance of this statement. He was
enacting an almost cult-like veneration of Kennedy. I thought
this was an extraordinary thing for a grown man to admit to.
We all have people that we venerate, but to be quite so public
about it, and about Kennedy, struck me as a little odd. I think
it’s all too easy for people to venerate Kennedy: he was young,
he was charismatic. But Kennedy was responsible for a lot of
bad things. He was responsible for the Alliance for Progress,
which helped to train the national security forces of repres-
sive regimes in Latin America; he contributed very substan-
tially to the beginning of the Vietnam War by sending advi-
sors to Vietnam. Eisenhower began it, but Kennedy escalated
it, and we know where that led. And there was the Bay of Pigs.
In other words there’s a lot in Kennedy’s politics to criticize,
and I got the feeling that none of that made any diference to
Conner. My suspicion is that to Conner what mattered about
Kennedy was his charisma, charisma without politics. Or may-
be he approved of Kennedy’s politics. I don’t know which I find
more disturbing.
43
 Which is all to say that I think Another Movie is a sign that
my attitude toward Conner is not unqualified. If there’s any-
one else who has a view of Conner that is qualified I don’t know
who it is, because I get the impression that everyone is just crazy
about the work and no one has any problems whatsoever with
his personality.
Scope: When do you think your views on Conner started
to change? There is of course the sequence in Standard Gauge
where you reflect on a piece of found footage that Conner had
also used in A Movie, and in an interview published by Film
Quarterly around the same time, you not only mention A Movie,
but spend time discussing Pines of Rome and the music’s dou-
ble relationship to fascism. It seems, even then, that you had al-
ready begun to reconsider the film’s aesthetics and politics.
Fisher: I can’t give a specific date when my view changed,
but clearly by the time I did that interview. All the material in
Standard Gauge is material I more or less found. When I was
working as a stock-footage researcher I had come across a scene
in A Movie where an Italian fascist, Pietro Caruso, is executed
by a firing squad. It made a huge impression on me and I thought
it would be nice to use it in Standard Gauge, so I went to look for
it. It wasn’t a matter of coming across it: I actually wanted to find
it, and I did, at the Sherman Grinberg Film Library, but it would
have cost money. But as I said in Standard Gauge, they asked if in
lieu of this shot I would be happy with just any piece of footage
they could give me. To be nice I said sure, and they reached into
a special container you use to dispose of nitrate to keep the fire
from spreading in case the film ignites, and pulled out these two
shots of the Hindenburg, which appears in Conner’s film several
times. And that was just the most extraordinary gift one could
possibly imagine. I didn’t get what I was looking for, and by pure
chance I got a piece showing a subject that was in A Movie, al-
though in scenes that were diferent.
One way to begin to approach A Movie in a less than totally
awestruck or admiring way is to point out the number of people
who die in it. The number of violent deaths in A Movie is strik-
ing. There’s the Hindenburg crash, car crashes, the execution
of Pietro Caruso, and the bodies of Mussolini and his mistress,
among others, so many deaths that it becomes a thematic, and
such a strong presence in the film that it has to be dealt with.
But I would stress again that it has taken me a very long time
to come to an attitude toward the film that I think I’ve now
settled on.
To me the question of A Movie is the extent to which it seems
to hint at, or brush up against, or enact an aesthetic that I’ll
call a fascist aesthetic. I said this obliquely in the interview in
Film Quarterly but I didn’t come right out and say it. In sug-
gesting that A Movie could be looked at in this light, what I’m
referring to is the idea of destruction as aesthetic spectacle.
The imagery in A Movie isn’t exclusively concerned with de-
struction and violence as aesthetic delectation, but nonethe-
less I think it’s a very strong presence. And addition to the
many deaths, there are two atomic bomb explosions. To look
ahead a little, in Crossroads (1976), that’s all there is: a nu-
clear explosion over and over again, ofered as an occasion
44
for dreamy aesthetic delectation. I think that’s a frighten-
ing idea, but I get the impression that people just don’t see it
that way.
So if there is this taste of a fascist aesthetic, and Mussolini
is shown dead in the film, does that contradict the politics, that
is, the fascism, that the film’s aesthetic implies? Because at the
obvious level we’re seeing the bodies of Mussolini and his mis-
tress, as well as the execution of Caruso. To go back to Standard
Gauge, I said in the narration that Caruso was the head of a
prison where political prisoners had been kept, but he was more
than that, he was the head of the police in Rome and was con-
victed of war crimes. In their deaths don’t we see the defeat of
fascism? I would say not; I think that in spite of them the film
can still be understood in relation to fascist aesthetics.1
Scope: Is this an additional reason, save for the third move-
ment, to forego imagery in your film? In the sense that you’ve
restored authorship to Respighi, are you likewise removing
Conner’s fingerprint?
Fisher: I think that’s a good way to put it, to restore Respighi’s
authorship, to recover the music in the sense that it would allow
us to hear it in the way Respighi wanted it heard, but at the same
time Conner’s fingerprints remain because it is all but inevitable
that he is penetrating our consciousness as we’re watching the
black screen. There are many people who only know Respighi’s
music through Conner’s use of it. So my goal is to tell people, via
text, what Respighi intended his music to represent, and then
allow the music to play over black so that we will be free to see in
our imaginations what Respighi wanted. But our knowledge of
Conner’s film and our knowledge of the images that we saw when
we first heard Respighi’s music could likely cause the memory of
those images to supplant, or displace, what we had learned only
a few minutes before, when we see Respighi’s words. Our memo-
ry of the Conner film, which is a visual and aural memory, would
be more memorable than the words that Respighi wrote. And
then when we get to the point of the music that Conner didn’t
use, which is all of the third movement, I wanted a scene that
would literalize the music and the scene that Respighi thought
his music was depicting. That is certainly a banal relation, but it
provides the contrast to what Conner did with the music that I
think is necessary. Then in the end we’re back to associating the
music with Conner, instead of the triumphant march along the
Appian Way to the Capitoline.
1 Fisher explained later that in saying A Movie traics in destruc-
tion and death as aesthetic spectacle he was thinking of the last
sentence of Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction”: “Fiat ars, pereat mundus, says Fascism,
and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratifica-
tion of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This
is evidently the consummation of ‘l’art pour l’art.’ Mankind, which in
Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods,
now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that
it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the
first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering
aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.”

The title of the film is of course an explicit reference to
Conner’s movie. Beyond the title, the typography of the main
titles was as close to that in Conner’s film as the designer could
make it. So it’s all very deliberate: these things are meant to
evoke comparison, to put it mildly. I think Another Movie relies
on people’s memories of A Movie to create a complicated relation
to the music. I think that for many viewers when they get to the
third movement in Another Movie it will come as a shock: they
have no idea that this part of the music exists. And furthermore
they’ll find that it’s music of a very diferent character: totally
unlike the other movements, which is why Conner didn’t use it,
because it didn’t suit the images he was working with, whereas
there’s this almost perfect appositeness of nearly all the images
in A Movie to the music.
In that sense Another Movie isn’t exactly a complement to A
Movie, but together they add up to something that’s more than
either one of them. In my film you get all of Respighi’s music
and a visualization of the one movement Conner omitted. So
between my film and his film, in principle, we’re ofered a visu-
alization of the entirety of Respighi’s music—albeit in two very
diferent registers. The viewer, having seen both films, will be
able to construct this imaginary film.
Scope: Your film isn’t really a complement or a compliment. I
guess you could say it’s a critique.
Fisher: I would say that yes, it is. But at the same time the
films are interlocked in a funny way. My film depends on the film
it critiques.
Scope: The image used for the third movement is an original
image—you shot it yourself?
Fisher: I shot it myself. And I was very literal: I went to Rome
and I shot it on the Janiculum. That’s the least I could do. The
scene as Respighi describes it includes more than I could get in
Picture and Sound Rushes
one static shot while keeping out streetlights and cars passing
by, but I did my best.
Scope: How aware were you of the length of the shot and what
needed to be done in order to correspond to the music?
Fisher: The shot needed to be as long as the movement. It had
to be one uninterrupted shot, and as it turned out it was barely
long enough. I had to allow for the fact that the moon moves. I
think the shot is seven minutes. It’s a static shot but the moon
begins in one place and ends up in another. And the clouds com-
ing along and occasionally obscuring the moon was a matter of
chance, which was okay with me.
Scope: It was shot digitally?
Fisher: It was shot with a Black Magic digital camera. It’s the
first digital scene I’ve shot that was intended for a work to be
shown theatrically.
Scope: People are always quick to try and contextualize your
new films in relation to your earlier work. Are these correspond-
ences something you think about at all? The reclamation aspect
of Another Movie, for example, could be compared to similar
ideas driving ( ), while the isolation of audio and visual tracks
during certain movements in Another Movie reminded me of
Picture and Sound Rushes.
Fisher: I think that maybe ( ) has less to do with Another
Movie than Picture and Sound Rushes. With ( ) what I wanted to
do was de-functionalize insert shots. What interested me there
was rescuing inserts from their role as storytelling devices, so
that we could see them not as elements performing a certain
function, but as shots—liberating them from their stories, so to
speak. But I suppose that could be called generative, and thus a
kind of rescue operation or rehabilitation. Another Movie is res-
cuing Respighi from Conner. In ( ) it’s not as if I’m giving the
authorship of the inserts back to those who shot them, since
45

the shots were never taken away from them or appropriated
and used in a way other than what they were made to do. I was
just enabling them to be seen in another way, and that’s what
Another Movie does with respect to the music.
As for Picture and Sound Rushes, half of that movie is silent and
half of the movie is black. As a percentage, there is more black in
Another Movie than there is in Picture and Sound Rushes, but if
we can think of Picture and Sound Rushes as being in some way
an early example of what I’m willing to ask an audience to put up
with, then Another Movie isn’t that much more. And almost all of
Another Movie has sound. It’s nothing like the deprivation you
get in Picture and Sound Rushes, where it’s literally half silent.
So on balance, taking sound and image together into account,
the deprivation in Another Movie is not that much greater than
Picture and Sound Rushes, if it is in fact greater at all.2
Scope: Thom Andersen once wrote in Cinema Scope that
“Fisher’s films are constructed to frustrate transcendental spec-
ularization,” while P. Adams Sitney has referred to your work as
“anti-sublime.” If Another Movie works as intended, could this be
said to be your first film that approaches the sublime?
2 Following up later, Fisher stated: “In Picture and Sound Rushes
I think we take the black as an occlusion. It’s not so literally, because
the camera was not running; that is, there is no image that was cre-
ated and then withheld from us. Nonetheless I think we take it as
something like an occlusion, a momentary withholding, that will
soon enough be over. And during those moments we can visualize
what is being withheld from us, this guy sitting behind a table talking
and gesturing.
“In Another Movie we take the black diferently. Nothing is being
withheld from us. That is, we can’t visualize a scene that the maker of
the movie has created but that for the moment he is withholding from
us but to which we will return. Rather, the moments of black recreate
the conditions for the reception of Respighi’s music as he intended it.
We’ve read his descriptions, then we hear his music. So in principle
we are liberated to visualize the images that he has just told us his
music describes.”
46
Another Movie
Fisher: Anti-sublime…well, I hope that’s okay! What was the
name of Sitney’s book, Visionary Film? Maybe the sublime and
visionary film are somehow related? In any case, what I think
your question does is turn us toward the nature of the music.
What I’ve done is so simple and matter-of-fact, showing an
image of the scene the music is meant to bring to mind, that in
principle it’s beyond banal. But I wouldn’t say that Respighi’s
music is sublime. I’m not even sure I know what the sublime is.
It’s certainly a very powerful piece of music. The most bombas-
tic passages come at the end, which essentially describe a scene
of military power, or glory: soldiers marching on the Appian
Way to ascend the Capitoline Hill. To my understanding the
sublime cannot be represented—it can only be experienced. A
picture of a scene that we would experience as the sublime if
we were there in the scene is very, very diferent from the ex-
perience of the sublime as such. It’s not even a displaced rep-
resentation of the sublime. It’s a picture of someone having an
experience that as we look at this person we are incapable of
having ourselves—it’s beyond our power to imagine it. So I don’t
think Respighi meant to represent the sublime, but I think it’s
possible to say that the music, especially the last movement,
has to power to envelop us almost corporeally and transport
us, somewhat as the sublime does. But that’s not my fault! I
was working with the music as Respighi gave it to me, and my
contribution was just this literalization of the third move-
ment, which is essentially a nocturne: it’s lyrical, it’s pastoral,
it’s serene. So if there’s anything of the sublime in my film it’s
a consequence of the music being what it is, which came to me
through Conner. So if Sitney is saying my movies are not con-
cerned with the sublime—as if that’s a criticism—I can live with
that, because I’m not interested in the sublime. When you’re at
the end of the movie and you’re watching a black screen, it’s a
very powerful, enveloping experience—maybe not enraptur-
ing, but it definitely does something to you. I don’t know if it’s
something we can call the sublime. Maybe the soundtrack to
the sublime.

Root Down
Yto Barrada’s Tree Identification for Beginners
There are no actual trees in Tree Identification for Beginners,
the latest film by the Moroccan artist Yto Barrada. The absence
is curious given not only the title, but the central role trees and
other foliage have played in several of the artist’s projects over
nearly two decades, as part of a diverse and interdisciplinary
practice that incorporates photography, sculpture, print, and in-
stallation. Whether literal or symbolic, the arboreal in Barrada’s
work can serve as a means of resistance or of decorative postur-
ing, opening onto questions of familial lineage, colonialism, and
urban development.
Nestled in the hyphen between “home” and “grown,” Barrada’s
varied oeuvre continually and deceptively interpellates global
questions of social and political development within seemingly
small-scale points of inquiry, chief among them her own family.
Living between Paris and Tangier, the artist frequently returns
to questions concerning the circulation of people and capital
Film/Art | by Jesse Cumming
through the use of symbols and metaphors, like the palm trees
that appear throughout her work: a species non-native to North
Africa that both references and represents the region’s past
colonial interventions.
The palm centres Barrada’s brief and unadorned  Beau
Geste  from 2009 (part of the larger Palm Project), in which she
hired and documented a trio of workers as they reinforced the
roots of a nearly collapsed tree in a lot on the outskirts of Tangier.
Situated in an area of the city that had seen increased specula-
tion from developers, Barrada and her collaborators (including
Galician filmmaker Oliver Laxe behind the camera) nurse the
tree’s wounds and support its foundations. Barrada narrates the
piece, ofering context for the city’s population and building boom
before detailing the step-by-step actions of the workers that will
temporarily halt (but are unlikely to forestall) the city’s develop-
ment—a gesture of fixity in a time and space of flux.
47
 The tension between fixity and flux is a driving influence in a
number of Barrada’s early videos, which followed upon an already
notable body of work in still photography. This entrée into film-
making also largely coincided with Barrada’s role as a co-founder
of the Cinémathèque de Tanger, the city’s lone arthouse cinema.
Given her extensive involvement with the Cinémathèque—she
served as the organization’s artistic director from its founding in
2006 to 2012, during which time it grew to include an archive and a
distribution wing—it’s perhaps unsurprising that during this peri-
od Barrada was also drawn to exploring the revelatory potential of
moving images, with a particular predilection for 16mm.
Shot with a fixed frame in front of a black curtain, Barrada’s
videos Le magicien (2003) and La contrebandière (2006) focus, like
Beau Geste, on a discrete action or activity, simply and efectively
playing with perception to introduce additional themes that run
through Barrada’s later moving-image work as well as her pho-
to and sculpture projects: mobility, trickery, and truths versus
fiction(s). In Le magicien, prestidigitator Abdelouahid el-Hamri
and his assistant perform a number of illusions before the final
shot pans down to reveal his trunk, with the hand-printed decla-
ration “Enciclopedia di Magia – Ilusionismo y Prestidigitacio”—a
perhaps unintentional but entirely appropriate hint at the art-
ist’s work with guide books, reference books, and archives. In
La contrebandière, we watch an elderly woman slowly and word-
lessly wrap her body in bright fabric before covering herself with
her inconspicuous djellaba, then perform the actions in reverse—a
demonstration of the means by which she smuggles textiles from
the Spanish enclave of Ceuta to Tangier.
The most accomplished and expansive of Barrada’s portraits of
practice is Faux départ (2015). Opening with a series of depopulat-
ed shots around and inside of a Moroccan hotel, in which we see
an assortment of fossils beneath the lobby’s glass-top cofee table
(its visual resemblance to an exhibition vitrine vague but notable),
the film then shifts to reveal the Moroccan industry of fake-fossil
manufacturing and the labour of its often unseen artisans. The
majority of the film follows fastidious workers in and around their
atelier as they mould, shape, and artificially weather their speci-
mens; asides include a brief shot of abandoned stones that serve
as the raw material, and footage of a sparse depot for the wares,
marked by signs as a “Magasin des fossiles avec des bon prix.”  missioned and produced for New York’s biennial Performa festi-
The film is nearly wordless apart from a staged sequence to-
wards its conclusion, in which a worker displays and explains the
tools he and his colleague use in their work: “This is a crowbar to
pry the stones from the ground. That’s a hammer, to break the
rocks and show what’s inside.” The result is a hypnotic and careful
consideration of technique, as Barrada recuperates and elevates
the practice of the forgers to the level of art while also posing larg-
er questions about history and historiography; never seen but pal-
pable throughout is the presence of tourists who circulate through
the region and purchase such wares, as did the colonial occupiers
before them.  try tour. While established as an ostensibly private initiative, the
Repeated actions, as well as trees, become entangled with
questions of international diplomacy, fakery, and urban planning
in the brief A Guide to Trees for Governers and Gardeners (2014).
48
A filmed translation of the artist’s 2003 sculpture Gran Royal
Turismo, Guide portrays a mechanical diorama in which a proces-
sion of three black cars cruises through a sparse, shabby town. As
they approach, dirty walls rotate to present an untainted white
façade, while flags and palm trees emerge from the ground; once
the cars have moved on, the Potemkin scenery reverts back to its
drab original form. In addition to the  diorama, A Guide to Trees
also responds to (and shares its title with) an artist book produced
in conjunction with Barrada’s  2011 survey Rifs, a show whose
polyvalent title references the Moroccan Rif mountains (a site of
anti-colonial warfare against the Spanish and French in the ’20s),
music, and general acts of mimicry. (“Cinéma Rif” is also the name
of the Cinémathèque de Tanger’s screening venue in the city cen-
tre.) In the case of the book, the most immediate rif is on Jonathan
Swift’s satirical 1729 essay A Modest Proposal, as it presents itself
as an earnest primer on how to properly prepare a postcolonial
city for visiting dignitaries, including recommendations for ex-
actly four-metre-tall palm trees as “a signal of wealth,  elegance,
fertility, exoticism, and order.” 
A further symbolic element of the tree one finds throughout
Barrada’s work is the roots, most often in the form of a family tree.
The daughter of psychotherapist and activist  Mounira Bouzid
and outspoken journalist Hamid Barrada (whose own father was
abducted during the Moroccan war for independence and has
never been found), Barrada frequently collapses the distance be-
tween personal and political histories: in the Rifs catalogue, for
instance, she includes a parallel timeline of key historical and po-
litical dates in Moroccan history alongside notable milestones
from her familial past. In the short film  Hand-Me-Downs (2011),
Barrada narrates episodes from her family history, which are
starkly and uneasily echoed through similar actions and scenes
in colonial home movies; speaking in the first person throughout,
Barrada alternates between her own perspective and that of her
mother as she recites a series of memories from childhood and
young adulthood.
Which brings us to Barrada’s latest (and, to date, longest) film
Tree Identification for Beginners, which, like Hand-Me-Downs,
draws from familial memories and introduces an idiosyncratic re-
lationship between its visual and aural elements. Initially com-
val, Tree Identification recounts, in a polyphonic voiceover that is
part personal and part historical, a trip to the US that the artist’s
mother Bouzid undertook in 1966 under the aegis of the Operation
Crossroads Africa (OCA) program.
Founded in 1958 and still active today, the OCA principally ar-
ranges coordinated summer travel programs for Americans in
Africa intended to promote cultural understanding and practi-
cal aid; in the mid-’60s, however, with funding from the US State
Department, it mounted a so-called “reverse-flow program” for se-
lected “Young African Leaders” to travel to the US for a cross-coun-
OCA’s utility as cultural-intellectual weapons in the Cold War was
no secret: as specified in a State Department memo that opens the
film, the reverse-flow program’s two main objectives were “To give
youth leaders from Africa insight into Americans and their coun-
try by means of a person to person relationship,” and, more naked-
ly, “To further American interests in Africa.”
As in Hand-Me-Downs, Barrada again voices her mother as she
narrates Bouzid’s first-person recollections of the journey, though
here she also intersperses these monologues with questions and
clarifications in the same voice and tone, as if reading from a con-
tinuous transcript. Coming from Paris, where she had been living
with leftist militants, Bouzid  applied  to the OCA program inde-
pendently. Unlike her fellow participants, who had been appoint-
ed by the embassies of their nations and several of whom, in her
words, “represented the future dictators of Africa,” Bouzid was
more agitator than dignitary-in-training, her attitude primarily
one of suspicion rather than enthusiasm (“I want to go see this
blue-ribbon imperialism for myself”). Throughout the film we
learn of Bouzid’s eforts to test and interrogate the practices of the
program, chief among them the instigation of a travel strike when
an airline stoppage would have forced the young participants to
travel by bus.  terest in the representation of process and practice. While the
In addition to Barrada’s recitation of her mother’s memories,
other voices read policy documents, reports, speeches, and oicial
correspondence (though a lack of oicial citations in the credits
introduces a critical gap in terms of which materials are historical
and which perhaps apocryphal). We hear testimonials of the travel
chaperone, and at one point a voice reads a letter from OCA found-
er James Herman Robinson responding to the striking program
participants; furthermore, the broader context of contemporary
American and international politics is emphasized via references
(including a mention of the 1965 disappearance of Moroccan pol-
itician Mehdi Ben Barka) and additional quotations, most notably
excerpts from Stokely Carmichael’s 1966  “Black Power” speech
that lend themselves to the film’s themes of pedagogy (“If we talk
about education we have to educate ourselves, not with Hegel or
Plato or the missionaries who came to Africa with the Bible and
we had the land, and when they left we had the Bible and they
had the land”). The film concludes with a final report on Bouzid’s
participation in the program, completed by an oicial guide:
“Tactfulness: Very little”; “Maturity and Emotional Stamina:
Volatile and quick-tempered.”  dium-sized cube from a slightly smaller or larger one. This basic
As in many of her earlier works, Barrada once again forges links
between material objects and geopolitical relations, though the
connections here are far looser and more interpretive than they are
in something like the documentary-oriented Faux départ. Rather
than archival footage or recreations, as a visual aid and accompa-
niment to the audio track Barrada presents a series of stop-motion
sequences involving foundational tools developed by educator
Maria Montessori, including famous items like Colour Boxes, the
Pink Tower, and a Binomial Cube. While not a direct adaptation
of a previous sculptural piece à la A Guide to Trees, Barrada’s use
of the colourful Montessori tools recalls her earlier Lyautey Unit
Blocks (Play) (2010), which used oversize building blocks to spell
out the last name of Hubert Lyautey, the first Resident General of
French-occupied Morocco and a major proponent of urban devel-
opment.  Likewise, sequences with materials like the Montessori
Botany Cabinet (an assortment of green wooden cut-outs, each
in a unique leaf shape) and a three-dimensional puzzle map of
Africa mimic Barrada’s malleable model  Tectonic Plate (2010).
Like the puzzle map, with the sculpture one is able to manipulate
and move the world’s continents, in this case forward or backward
along their future tectonic shift. The most substantial movement
the model permits is the erasure of the Strait of Gibraltar and the
eventual bridging of Africa and Europe—a geographically slim but
symbolically vast chasm that has remained a recurring point of in-
quiry for Barrada. 
Shot in collaboration with experimental filmmaker and ed-
ucator Steve Cossman of New York’s Mono No Aware analogue
film organization, the stop-motion animation sequences in Tree
Identification are all staged on the same nondescript set. Primary
colours and shapes dominate as spheres, cubes, and pyramids
shule around, assembling, disassembling, and reassembling in
seemingly autonomous eforts to produce new meanings or new
structures—another manifestation of Barrada’s overarching in-
sound and image tracks are frequently uncoupled or tenuously
connected, at other points they are linked by clever and consid-
ered devices. During one sequence in which a voice reads from the
OCA tour’s oicial handbook, Barrada pairs each individual word
with the corresponding Montessori grammar symbol: red balls for
vowels, large black pyramids for nouns, small blue pyramids for
adjectives, etc. The pseudo-synesthesia of this sequence extends
to the film’s foley sounds and the musical  accompaniment that
plays  intermittently throughout, most notably the colour-coded
clinks of a xylophone. 
Barrada’s intertwining of her mother’s history with her playful
but loaded manipulation of educational tools is further enriched
when we know that in the ’90s Bouzid founded and continues to
run the Tangier-based Darna Assocation, a non-profit organi-
zation that ofers education and support to children and women.
As a broader point of inquiry, and one that returns to the film’s
title, one might look at the educational goal put forth by several
of the Montessori tools: that of diferentiation and discrimina-
tion, whether of land from water, of orange from red, or of a me-
learning exercise takes on a considerably diferent colour in the
context of the “Young African Leaders’” OCA-sponsored tour
of the US: another quote from the State Department memo that
opens Tree Identification concedes that the participants might
encounter  “the negative aspect  of American contemporary real-
ity,” chief among them discrimination as it plays out along stark
racial divisions. 
One is reminded at last of another citation from the  text of
A Guide to Trees for Governors and Gardeners on the topic of
“Painting and Cleaning”: “A uniformly painted city reflects calm,
harmony, order, and discipline.” Incongruities and  inconsisten-
cies—be they visual, economic, or social—may be less sightly and
less palatable than a smooth façade, but they also provide a means
of  entry for education, political engagement, and intervention;
peeling paint is always easier to chip away.
49
Deaths of Cinema | by Max Goldberg

Light Year

Eye of
the Beholder
Paul Clipson (1965-2018)
“We are not so much agents as intermediaries when we introduce
film to light, as we might bring together two good friends, hoping
they will love one another as we love them both,” wrote Hollis
Frampton. Just such a benevolent spirit was Paul Clipson, whose
sudden death leaves the San Francisco Bay Area deprived of one
of its most genial, discerning, and prolific film artists. An insa-
tiable cinematographer and unfailingly insightful visual thinker,
Clipson’s lyrical filmmaking was only one aspect of his multifac-
eted passion for cinema. Having long since mastered in-camera
editing and superimposition, Clipson extended his intuitive art
in live collaborations with a cohort of sympathetic musicians and
composers. These performances became such a fixture of Bay Area
life over the last 15 years as to seem like their own milieu. I don’t
mean to make Clipson sound like a local phenomenon—his work
screened internationally—but the performance-intensive nature
of his work necessarily privileged geographic proximity.

50
 When I first met Clipson in 2008, he was working expressly—
and expressively—in Super 8mm. He would subsequently take up
16mm, anamorphic lenses, and multiple-projector performanc-
es—always deliberately, with an eye towards specific parameters
and historical antecedents—while maintaining the same basic
approach: constant filming; making studies of those aspects of
landscape and figure that magnetized his attention; compiling
footage into long reels to be projected in the performances; and
then sometimes, but not always, locking sound and image for a
completed film. Far from a means to an end, Clipson’s generative
process accommodated, and indeed thrived upon, multiple itera-
tions. This experimental approach to exhibition is clear even just
glancing at the typically demanding schedule he maintained over
the last months of his life: the premiere of a major new work with
Zachary Watkins at the Exploratorium (Black Field); a program
of recent films projected silently at Artists’ Television Access;
and a raft of improvised performances with regular collaborators
such as Watkins, Byron Westbrook, Grouper, Maggi Payne, and
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. To a degree unusual amongst filmmakers,
Clipson conceived of his work in terms of an ongoing practice—a
discipline, really. As such, Clipson’s filmography, extensive as it is,
cannot capture the full scope of his filmmaking.
Stills from the films give a good sense of the density and satu-
ration of Clipson’s compositions, but not their quicksilver mon-
tage. His subject, always, was light, the riddle of lumen, and he did
not shy away from its commonplace exhilarations (of which Dan
Browne’s recent article for the San Francisco Cinematheque pro-
vides a sensitive close reading). Clipson’s attraction to composit-
ed images, his play with scale, and his taste for fluidity in subject
and form all suggest a deep continuity with the avant-garde ideals
espoused by the French Impressionists a century ago. Pace Jean
Epstein, “The very plot of thought and matter…the very quid pro
quo of the real and the unreal, the very play of subjectivity and
objectivity are sprawled on the screen to be touched, palpated,
traversed, searched, dissected by the gaze.” The subjects occupy-
ing Clipson’s camera are, by these lights, orthodox: sun and moon,
eye and hand, intermittency of tree limbs and fingers, headlights
and neon, skyscrapers and flora, reflective surfaces galore. But the
familiar stock-in-trade only serves to underscore the intensity of
Clipson’s attack, the depth of his commitment: my sense is that
even the possibility of seeing the moon as if for the first time made
it endlessly interesting to him as a subject.
The open frame of performance gave Clipson latitude to explore
the psychological qualities of these insistent motifs, often enough
suggesting a kind of ritualistic trance. The mantra-like visual
repetitions, achieved through short bursts of shooting, correlat-
ed beautifully with the enveloping clouds of sound through which
his musical collaborators would work their magic. But this power-
ful gestalt, while in no small measure responsible for the work’s
accessibility, could make it easy to miss the delicate interplay
between Clipson’s immediate interests in the visible world, his
intuitions about how these elements would show up on film, and
his rich web of associations drawn across film history. So that, for
instance, an abiding concern for railway tracks might be activated
by the afternoon sun catching steel in such a way as to take natu-
ral advantage of Super 8mm’s “pulpy intensity” (his words), while
also stirring a longstanding obsession with the strong diagonals
opening Hitchcock’s Marnie.
Indeed, it took only a few minutes of conversation with Clipson
to realize that he enjoyed an unusually strong relationship to
film history, with untold camera movements, framings, design
elements, and idiosyncratic details committed to memory. He re-
turned to favourite films and auteurs frequently and generally ex-
emplified the projectionist’s intimacy with the medium. He worked
in this capacity for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for
nearly 20 years, and it’s to this day job that we owe REEL (LAND
AND SEA), a sui generis publication comprised of storyboard-
like drawings and notes he made for his colleagues in the booth.
I don’t doubt they appreciated this highly unusual professional
courtesy (the hand-drawn frames depict the shots leading into
each reel change), but the appeal to an outside reader lies in the
book’s eccentric yet eloquent evocation of, to quote Clipson’s in-
troduction, “an art form and projection technology that I still find
completely mystifying and magical.” The key entry is Testament of
Orpheus (1959), for which his characteristically droll observations
on the fated frames take the form of questions, each a trapdoor into
the world of the film: “Where are these ruins?”; “Cocteau’s hand?”;
“Studio or location?”; “Cocteau’s blood?”; “Is that cigarette smoke
hanging in the air?” Clipson typically closed his entries wishing
the projectionist good luck, but in this case he left of with a rare
note of admonishment: “Enjoy this Cocteau film—study it closely!”
Blessedly unencumbered by small-minded distinctions be-
tween narrative and experimental modes, Clipson was equally
afected by Otto Preminger’s work in ’Scope and Marie Menken’s
with a Bolex; Saul Bass’ titles and Bruce Baillie’s superimposi-
tions; Michael Powell’s reds and Kenneth Anger’s blues; Chantal
Akerman’s rectangles and Frank Staufacher’s zig-zags; Orson
Welles’ tracks and Chick Strand’s waves; Bernard Herrmann’s
strings and Stan Brakhage’s songs; Chris Marker’s specula-
tions and Bruce Conner’s reports; Luis Buñuel’s inside-out and
Elia Kazan’s outside-in; Vincente Minnelli’s carnival and Jonas
Mekas’ circus. That his own films will no longer be enlivened by
these often surprising associations is unbearably sad, and here
any semblance of critical distance evaporates, as Paul was a friend.
I remember sitting with him last summer in the last row of an
Oakland performance space, his bank of projectors just behind us.
Our conversation turned to Jerry Lewis, who had just died. Paul
reeled of a handful of characteristically dazzling observations,
adding that I had to read Chris Fujiwara’s interview (one always
came away from such conversations with a recommendation).
He told me that he had assembled a kind of supercut of Lewis’
films and talk-show appearances for a friend’s class and then, af-
ter a pause, said that teaching was impossibly diicult. This was
Paul all over in the mix of acuity and modesty, but it wasn’t for
him to say whether or not he was a teacher. That falls to us, his
grateful students.
51
Festivals | By Robert Koehler
Sundance 2018
What’s the Story?
In Park City this January, all of those attending the Sundance Film
Festival were told in no uncertain terms on a daily, if not hourly, ba-
sis that “the story lives in you.” The statement was right there on the
cover of the catalogue, so dominant that it replaced the words—“Sun-
dance Film Festival”—that you’d assume would be there. (Those
words were left to the catalogue spine.) Other words accompanied
this insistent phrase on the cover, including “Obsession,” “Euphoria,”
and “Graceful Chaos.” These were part of what could charitably be
termed the strangest graphic system ever applied to a major film fes-
tival, which involved nothing more than blue colour fields and such
odd, disassociated words in orange serif lettering: a banner on Main
Street, the bustling thoroughfare at the heart of the Utah ski resort,
showed the word “Selfish,” while another at the Prospector Square
Theater announced “Irrational Madness.”
Whether or not the graphic design firm hired by the festival was
trying to suggest something with these bizarre spurts of Orwellian
Newspeak was impossible to tell, but there was no doubt about the
core principle about how important “story” is and where it “lives.”
The edict capped the festival trailer, and if you didn’t get it al-
ready, then Kenneth Cole drilled it home with the most astonish-
ing sponsor ad, like, ever. In a three-minute promo for the brand’s
winter coats and designed to honour the exceptionally dedicated
and well-organized volunteer staf (these are the hardest-working
unpaid people in show business, make no mistake about it), Cole’s
52
Mandy
daughter Amanda (credited as “performer”) recited a script-
written by three people, including herself and dad, that extolled
how Sundance is the ultimate coming-together of a progressive
community of storytellers and dreamers, and that quoted Plato,
Margaret Atwood, and Robert Redford, all of them reminding us
that “Story” is all. There really is nothing else that matters.
For a festival which most of the world looks upon with a com-
bination of admiration, fascination, and, in some ways, intimida-
tion, and which is depicted as the annual coming-out for the best
American independent cinema has to ofer up to this minute, an
ideological foundation is usually not ascribed to Redford’s snowy
confab. But it should be, because the ideology is there, and say what
you will about the goofy graphics, it was put there in bold print for
the masses like a campaign slogan. Film Festival = Story. If cinema
doesn’t concern story, then it isn’t cinema. No question, no debate.
This would be news to generations of actual American inde-
pendents who’ve been making cinema without any stories at all,
and it might be a welcome bromide in a debate that a thoughtful fes-
tival could stage, a debate whose title might be, “Is Cinema About
Story Alone?” Which would only lead, pace Bazin, to the following
question: “What is Story?” It’s fair to assume, given his fantastic if
still underexamined totalitarian reach into the hearts and minds
of American moviemakers, that by “Story” the Sundance graphic
means Robert McKee, he of the rigid three-act story graph.
 That’s because, as always, there were McKee movies aplenty
at Sundance (as there are, in fact, at most festivals), which made
it all the more fascinating to observe that the festival’s greatest
movie and possibly its greatest in many, many years—Canadian
filmmaker Panos Cosmatos’ lysergic motorcycle n’ chainsaw n’
Nic Cage Walpurgisnacht wonder titled Mandy—indicated that
the two-act structure might be just the way to go. (So, too, did
the only good work in the festival’s routinely overlooked World
Cinema Narrative competition, Rust, directed by Aly Muritiba
and written by Muritiba and Jessica Candal, which subtly dram-
atizes the aftermath of a high-school sexting scandal.) In fact,
the one recognizably three-act movie guided mostly by The God
of Story that excelled at its job was, of all things, Puzzle, directed
by Marc Turtletaub and written by Oren Moverman, a film about
a Connecticut housewife (Kelly McDonald, in a career-best per-
formance) who finds meaning and purpose in her life through
solving jigsaw puzzles. The best stories envelop the audience so
totally that the artifice of storytelling vanishes; Puzzle is that kind
of movie.
Puzzle also won a prize more coveted at Sundance than the two
dozen or so awards it hands out, the one that makes Sundance-
watching such an obsessive project for the Los Angeles-New York
industry complex trudging through the snow: the US distribution
deal. In Puzzle’s case, the deal was a perfectly suitable and sound
one with Sony Pictures Classics, virtually guaranteeing it a classy,
possibly made-for-Oscars rollout. Others, like the $10 million doled
out by two evidently deep-pocketed outfits—Neon and upstart
AGBO—for writer-director Sam Levinson’s unimpressive high-
school girls’ revenge movie, Assassination Nation, was indicative of
how the frenzied atmosphere of anticipation over the next It Thing
remains Sundance’s albatross. A typical session of TIFF’s Midnight
Madness has its supply of Assassination Nations (Levinson’s under-
cooked fantasy was slotted in Sundance’s Midnight section along-
side Mandy and the overhyped haunted-house thriller Hereditary),
but there’s no possible way that such dealmaking money would be
thrown around so flagrantly after a late-night Ryerson screening. A
sure sign that the new It Thing hadn’t been discovered is that with-
in 48 hours of this deal’s announcement, people were talking more
about the cash than the movie.
The buyers’ desperation was the other talking point: I overheard
one buyer muttering to a colleague on Day Six, “I’m having a terri-
ble time,” while another used the term “ghastly.” The long-term
problem is that Sundance long ago saw its success taken over by
buyers who drive the talking points that are then amplified by the
press. If, on the other hand, one were to take a critic’s approach, be-
ing a tad curatorial in viewing, passing on parties, scheduling a few
days of seven screenings, and watching a fair share of streaming
screeners sent by publicists and producers, one could manage to
see up to as many as 20 works (features, shorts, live performances
and the new-new It Thing, VR) that were excellent to good. (That’s
out of 68 total titles I’ve seen.) Compared to nearly every other
Sundance I’ve attended, that’s impressive.
Such viewing reinforced two truths: a) The work most slavish-
ly stuck in a McKee-style paradigm is guaranteed to produce the
worst results, such as Rupert Everett’s death-slog bio of Oscar
Wilde as an old man The Happy Prince, the awful Hamlet-reset
Ophelia, or Gus Van Sant’s hopelessly sappy biopic Don’t Worry, He
Won’t Get Far on Foot, a film that misses the whole point (and hu-
mour) of its subject, cartoonist John Callahan; and b) When gen-
uinely interesting cinema breaks out, it insists on its own sense
of the world, whether or not that has something to do with any-
one’s idea of a story. Besides, if you really want full-blown stories,
go watch television, which is speedboating cinema when it comes
to presenting novel-sized narratives. (A form, incidentally, that
a film festival is particularly poor at presenting, since to watch a
multi-episode epic consumes more viewing time than even the
most devoted Lav Diaz groupie might allow, although that didn’t
stop Sundance from screening two of them: Chapman and McLain
Way’s 388-minute bound-for-Netflix Wild Wild Country and Steve
James’ latest doc-epic on Chicago, the 300-minute America to Me.)
A James-backed project that grew out of young Rockford,
Illinois skateboarder Bing Liu’s pleasure with videotaping his
pals, Minding the Gap is fresher and more memorable than any-
thing James has made in years. At first, Liu’s coming-of-age ac-
count feels dull, straining for seriousness, and of-key, with sol-
emn soundtrack music under thrilling skateboarding action shots
and the filmmaker doing his own narrating. But Liu’s multi-panel
portrait of four young boys-to-men, including himself, develops
the texture and resonance of a novel without ever trying to do so;
the simplicity and modesty of just recounting the ways in which
young lives—and those of their parents—can strain and break in
modern America is the basis of this movie’s wisdom.
The foregrounding of place as a principle as important as nar-
rative was a constant factor in this Sundance edition’s best work:
places we may have never been, like Rockford, or like Great Falls,
Montana, in Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan’s unexpectedly rich ad-
aptation of Richard Ford’s Wildlife, or the mid-Southern semi-
wilderness and two-bit towns seen in another fine surprise by an-
other actor, Ethan Hawke’s Blaze, which covers key sequences in
the rowdy life of country singer-songwriter Blaze Foley (played by
Benjamin Dickey with the movie’s own ambling, shaggy-dog atti-
tude). The places themselves are in the titles of two of the very best
on view: Robert Greene’s Bisbee ’17 and RaMell Ross’ Hale County
This Morning, This Afternoon, the latter counting Apichatpong
Weerasethakul as an artistic advisor, and showing it. Unlike Liu in
Rockford, Ross was simply a visitor to Selma, Alabama and its en-
virons when he began shooting everyday moments and slowly find-
ing a pattern to images and a tempo to the montage that approach-
es the sense of mentally recalling things from one’s recent past.
Though set in the historical heart of the American Civil Rights
Movement’s tumultuous birth, Ross’ movie insists on a present
that turns young African-American men and women into agents
of pleasure and work (very often involving college basketball) and
subjects of a poetic gaze.
Greene was also a visitor to Bisbee, Arizona, but in this case
the purpose is expressly historical and political. In 1917, the
International Workers of the World determined that an industrial
shutdown of US factories would halt WWI, and targeted Bisbee,
53
centre of American copper mining. In a little-remembered inci-
dent known as “The Bisbee Deportation,” the sherif of Cochise
County gathered a posse, arrested the IWW agitators, rounded
them up in the local ballpark, dumped them into cattle cars, and
railroaded them to a remote New Mexican desert where many of
them died. In both Kate Plays Christine (2016) and Actress (2014),
Greene has recently been interested in variations on the idea of
the artificial line that separates actors and their characters. With
Bisbee ’17, he extends that idea to the world of everyday citizens
recreating historical events, and wrestling with the hard realities
and challenges of taking on their particular role—in this case, rad-
ical union fighters or homegrown fascists. While on one hand sim-
ply recording the re-creation that the town was planning to do an-
yway on the episode’s centenary, Greene widens his scope from his
earlier work to observe an ensemble of “actors” and an entire com-
munity, many of whom, like Fernando Serrano, are the darker-
skinned “others” who filled IWW membership rolls and whom the
good white people of Bisbee wanted, literally, out on a rail.
Place over story is key to Michael Dweck’s The Last Race, by a
long stretch the festival’s great discovery. Whatever narrative
seeps into his documentary, if you can call it that, clearly counts
for little to Dweck compared to his endless fascination with the
sights, smells, speed, and characters that roam the last stock-car
racetrack in Long Island. A renowned photographer, Dweck loves
the subculture that keeps Riverhead Racetrack alive, even as the
Saturday-night crowds dwindle. Rather than making a maudlin
swan’s song, Dweck forges a defiant symphony of images (early
mystic Christian music set to grease-monkey antics) that cele-
brates the liberating energy of metal on metal, capped by a stun-
ning, long-held shot inside a car’s compartment of what may be the
last victor of the track’s last race. Not since Le Mans (1971) have
I seen racing captured with such sensorial variety and pleasure,
but unlike the daunting Formula One tracks Riverhead is a mom-
and-pop operation (we see the elderly owners, dawdling away
in their humble oice), with racers who make their livings doing
things like exterminating bees in nearby tony Hamptons estates
they could never aford. Without ever announcing it, the movie be-
comes a tone poem about an American landscape where working
folks are getting rubbed out by money, developers are waiting in
the wings to pounce at the closure of a beloved institution, and ex-
pected failure makes a U-turn.
Which brings us to Mandy, featuring the movie star whom
everyone always seems to be anticipating to self-destruct in one
grand career auto-da-fé. Nicolas Cage has in fact been getting his
artistic second wind for a while, just if you count Bad Lieutenant:
Port of Call New Orleans (2009) and Joe (2013), and once you’ve
seen Mandy, you’ll just throw in the towel and realize that Cage is
at his career peak. But that happens in the second hour of a mov-
ie so brazenly realized that the first hour seems an impossible act
to follow, until it’s not. In the first half, it isn’t even Cage’s mov-
ie, but that of Andrea Riseborough and Linus Roache. Cage, as in
Joe, is a logger, and lives in what an intertitle calls “The Shadow
Mountains” with wife Mandy (Riseborough), who paints phan-
tasmagorical canvases never shown onscreen (until, perhaps,
54
the film’s final, Turner-esque shot). The moment Riseborough
appears, the reason for the title is obvious: she exerts a magnetic
hold, her nearly eyebrow-less face a strange balance of ancient vi-
sion and childlike innocence. Riseborough was in no less than four
Sundance movies and brilliant in each (also Nancy, an unsettling
psychodrama in which she co-produced and starred; Burden, in
which she plays a Walmart employee caught up in a town’s KKK
controversies; and TIFF import The Death of Stalin, in which she
portrays Stalin’s daughter Svetlana). I met people who saw all or
most of these and didn’t realize this fact; she may be the ultimate
chameleon actor of our era.
Roache’s madman cult leader, a Christian fanatic named
Jeremiah, kidnaps Mandy with the help of a squad of monstrous
black creatures on tricked-out motorcycles. His singular idea of
torture is to get her stoned and mesmerize her with talk, a verbal
seduction of a length that would make Paddy Chayefsky blush, but
Mandy—in an acting moment that should be one for the ages—re-
sponds by laughing in his face. It turns the movie on its head.
Mandy is so attentive to the original impulses of the midnight
movie that it remembers how slow many of them were—watch El
Topo (1970) if you don’t believe it—and how they held to a genuinely
transgressive ethos. The gradual, almost somnambulistic build of
the first half snaps, and unlike the more uncertainly held longeurs
of Cosmatos’ first movie, Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010), this one
knows when it’s time to start kicking some ass. Cage’s Red, seeing
what happens to Mandy, bottoms out and dissolves (in a bathroom
scene that teeters on the edge of what looks like actual insanity),
re-emerging as an avenger who transcends his husbandly role to
the status of a killer angel soaked in his name’s colour. Face-ofs
with the black monster guys? You got it. Duels with big and bigger
chainsaws? Sure. Mano a mano with Roache in a Jodorowsky-like
church? Baby, you got it.
What was most telling about the after-efect of Mandy on the
viewer—just pack the bags and split, buddy, because you ain’t see-
ing anything better—is that the promised sensations of the festi-
val’s upgraded virtual-reality rides—er, works—couldn’t hope to
top Cosmatos’ spectacle. Out of 11 VR projects I waded through
(having to wait for them, like a reservation-holder at a restaurant,
for several precious minutes in prescribed time windows), only
one, titled Hero, produced by iNK Stories and placing the view-
er in the POV of a White Helmet worker in a bombed Syrian city,
achieved both substance and an impressive technical advance in
VR’s dream of an enveloping audio-visual experience. The force
of the bomb’s explosion is one thing; the touch of a child’s arm as
you rescue it from a building cave-in is something else again. Hero
nearly made one forget about how New Frontier, the section which
used to be home to Sundance’s few experimental movies (only tru-
ly represented this edition by Johann Lurf’s , a fun, mesmerizing
catalogue of film scenes with starry nights, including, it should be
noted, one from Beyond the Black Rainbow), has been virtually tak-
en over by VR. The VR trend, now on display at a film festival near
you, started in Park City, so total colonization of what it means to
be “experimental” is the next inevitable step.
But that’s another story.

Season of the Bear
If you’re looking for the lowdown on this year’s Berlinale
Competition, which is known far and wide for its mediocrity,
you’ve come to the wrong place. This year’s edition looked espe-
cially bleak on paper, and this writer’s one attempt to venture
into the great unknown did not go unpunished. Axel Petersén
and Måns Månsson’s revolting “comedy” The Real Estate is an
ofensive and elitist satire of the housing crisis in Stockholm that
irresponsibly revels in its protagonist’s classism far more than
it criticizes it; it may have been the section’s worst entry, though
thankfully I can neither be proven right nor wrong. (Continuing
with a habit of missing prizewinners, I’ll have to catch up later
with Adina Pintilie’s surprise Golden Bear winner Touch Me Not.)
The standouts were predictable but welcome, coming from stal-
wart auteurs Christian Petzold, Lav Diaz, and Wes Anderson (who
I’m tired of having to convince people about; see Isle of Dogs and
decide for yourself, or not).
Petzold’s timely Transit transports Anna Seghers’ 1944 novel to
the contemporary world, transforming the past into a dystopian
future-almost-present. A cross between a bloated Vincent Gallo
and Joaquin Phoenix, Franz Rogowski plays Georg, who escapes
to Marseille from Paris as German troops are closing in. The year
is unclear, as is the political situation: allusions to “camps” and
Festivals | By Adam Cook
Transit
Berlin 2018
“cleansings” that in Seghers’ novel are direct references to the
Holocaust imply that major events have taken place, but this feels
like it could be terrifyingly soon. Immigrants and subversives
aren’t tolerated, and almost everyone Georg encounters is a ref-
ugee struggling to obtain the necessary papers to flee, caught up
in a Kakaesque nightmare. Georg is in possession of a manuscript
and letters belonging to a dead writer named Weidel, one of which
ensures a visa to Mexico. The embassy mistakes Georg for Weidel,
so he assumes his identity, claiming the visa. Georg soon befriends
the son and wife of a dead friend, immediately becoming a surro-
gate father figure. A mysterious woman, Maria (Paula Beer), who
repeatedly mistakes Georg for her missing husband, comes into
the picture, also attracting his attention. Many details are relayed
in narration with uncertain reliability by a bartender who bears
witness to the predicaments of Georg (and surely many others) in
his establishment-cum-way station, this passive storyteller ironi-
cally the one character with a stable home.
And so Georg assumes two roles, neither his own, in an exile of
the self, and we never get a sense of his pre-war identity. He and
the other characters seek safe passage and equally crave the com-
fort of mattering to someone else; in essence they are Petzoldian
ghosts haunted by the loneliness of belonging nowhere. The film
55
itself is likewise in transit, switching narrative tracks, teasing
with red herrings and false trajectories, always leading to dead
ends. Petzold’s formal intelligence and command of codified gen-
re language is deployed with such dry cleverness that it can easily
mislead. Like Phoenix, Transit creates a Brechtian distance with
an analytic style that subverts its genre surface and requires ac-
tive involvement by viewers. The plot becomes secondary to the
implications hovering around its periphery, and our protagonist
secondary to the unnamed—a point movingly airmed in a key
moment where Georg opens an apartment door to discover a large
group of refugees in hiding. Petzold mines the tension between
Transit’s schematic design and the deathly seriousness of its
themes. Georg, like many, is stranded in indefinite limbo, some-
where in the same narrow space between past and future shared
by the film itself. Whether or not you think Transit is a master-
work, it certainly finds a master at work.
Speaking of masters at work, those who pay attention to another
dystopian realm known as “Film Twitter” may also be aware of a
slow but growing backlash against Lav Diaz, whose international
cachet has risen of late thanks to winning prizes with consecutive
films in Locarno, Berlin, and Venice. By no means is Diaz’s work
immune to criticism, and not all of his films are created equal, but
this trend reeks of reactionary reverse-elitism.
In any case, his latest is superb. At a lean 234 minutes, Season of
the Devil is a musical with wall-to-wall a cappella songs. Lacking
in nuance but full of feeling, the film takes on the attributes of
opera (not so much “rock opera” as advertised), presenting a vi-
sion of good and evil set in 1979, seven years into martial law
under the reign of Ferdinand Marcos and two years after the es-
tablishment of the Civilian Home Defense Force (CHDF). The
good: an inspiring poet named Hugo (Piolo Pascual) and his wife
Lorena (Shaina Magdayao), a doctor who leaves home to set up
a clinic in a dangerous barrio. The evil: the power-mad CHDF,
which seeks to rid the land of communists and eradicate any dis-
sent, led by two ruthless militiamen, the scar-faced Ahas (Joel
Saracho) and Tenyente (Hazel Orencio). Their strategy is to use
the power of myth, spreading rumours of predatory supernatural
forces that are claiming the lives of local rebels. Upon Lorena’s
departure, our ostensible hero poet degenerates into alcoholism
and hopelessness.
With little dimension to his characters, Diaz places emphasis
instead on emotion and the expressive articulation of sufering
through song. Surprisingly, the format is a perfect match for Diaz,
who also wrote all of the music. The physical act of singing and the
actors’ limitations gives the film fragility and humility, and allows
standout songs to land like a sledgehammer. Several numbers are
paired with some of Diaz’s most striking images: rooms are of-
ten menacingly framed from the corner with violent white light
piercing the interiors. Some numbers are heart-wrenching, such
as “Aling Maria,” a song performed by pop star Bituin Escalante
about a mother, who we can see in the background of the frame,
waiting in vain at her window for her missing son to return; to-
wards the film’s bleak closing they become downright brutal, as in
“Talampunay Blues,” which features Lorena’s captors singing and
dancing as they sexually assault her. Cruelty starts to lay siege to
56
the beauty of the music just as the CHDF succeeds in its goals of
degradation. Season of the Devil is at once one of Diaz’s most pun-
ishing and transcendent films, and left Berlin Bear-less.
Turning to the more expertly curated and wide-ranging Forum,
which presented an especially strong selection, two films stood
out, both of which deal with sports. Julien Faraut’s L’empire de la
perfection is culled from stunning 16mm archival footage of ten-
nis superstar John McEnroe, shot at the French Open between the
early- and mid-’80s by Gil de Kermadec, an obsessive student and
teacher of the game whose focus on the precise movements of the
body shares qualities with Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard
Muybridge’s proto-cinematic studies. Opening with Godard’s
“cinema lies, sport doesn’t” quote, the film interrogates these
images of McEnroe, beginning with slow-motion repetitions of
his idiosyncratic serving technique. Not limited to capturing
McEnroe’s competitive excellence, Faraut also shows us his in-
famous tantrums and contentious interactions with oicials and
members of the media between sets, providing a window into his
psychology. That McEnroe despised being filmed and recorded
imbues the film with an almost sadistic irony leavened by its in-
herent reverence of his brilliance. By the end of the film, it’s clear
just how McEnroe’s body moves and how his mind works. Sport
doesn’t lie, but isn’t this cinema? Serge Daney’s fascination with
tennis and his years of covering the sport for Libération makes for
an insightful tangent. He sees the player as director, compress-
ing and expanding time until he yells “cut,” or in this case, wins a
point. For all the intellectual musings delivered in narration, albe-
it spiritedly by Mathieu Amalric, the film would benefit from let-
ting its remarkable images speak more for themselves. However,
for tennis admirers and cinephiles alike, L’empire de la perfection
serves up intoxicating formal beauty.
Corneliu Porumboiu’s new documentary, like The Second Game
(2014), is again fixated on soccer. Infinite Football mostly consists
of the director in conversation with his friend Laurentiu Ginghina,
who has some ideas about how to give the beautiful game what he
considers to be a much-needed makeover. First, we hear his tale of
woe: an injury that ended his days on the pitch made him realize
the rules of the game were insuicient to protect players like him-
self. His main ideas are changing the shape of the field to round out
the corners and to limit the mobility of players with restrictions
as to which part of the field each player can occupy: he claims this
makes the game safer and keeps the ball moving, in turn making
it more exciting. Porumboiu gives his friend a lot of room to make
his case, but isn’t so convinced. Laurentiu’s earnest conviction
makes him instantly endearing, but it’s also hard not to laugh at
him, seemingly in sync with the film’s playful mockery. Laurentiu
keeps adapting his proposed changes to address the flaws in his in-
itial plan, and it’s not long before he seems to be pushing an entire-
ly diferent and even less plausible set of rules. Porumboiu enlists
some players and a coach to put theory into practice, with hilari-
ous results. The less credence to the concept, the more we feel for
Laurentiu, whose dreaming is inspired by how the game he loved
both hurt him and was taken away from him.
When Laurentiu’s father bizarrely gifts a family photo to
Porumboiu, pointing out the intricacies of his poetic eye be-

fore fervently analyzing a horribly kitschy painting on the wall,
Porumboiu shows his hand, as what he has been evolving scene
by scene is a humanistic tribute to armchair inventors and think-
ers, shifting power from the filmmaker to the subject as creator.
At first glance the film is deceptively sloppy and slight: inelegant
mobile shots of conversation feel spontaneous, and indeed the di-
rector shot the film using a skeleton crew with little to no prepara-
tion. But Infinite Football is the best testament yet to Porumboiu’s
genius, as he moulds seemingly artless parts into an unexpectedly
profound whole. To this end, it calls to mind Jafar Panahi’s This
Is Not a Film (2011), and, more broadly, other directors working
freely and contentedly in modest modes, like Matías Piñeiro,
Philippe Garrel, and Hong Sangsoo, who returned to the Berlinale
with Grass.
After what you could label a career year for Hong, his latest
plays like a reflexive bufer taking as its subject the act of observ-
ing and translating human nature. Kim Minhee is centre stage
again (kind of) as a young woman in a café, typing away on her lap-
top as she eavesdrops on other patrons’ gossip, while commenting
in voiceover. As Grass continues, it’s unclear what role she’s play-
ing: is she merely recording what’s happening? Making it up? Does
it matter? Dark dramas of suicide and betrayal beyond the frame
are evoked in emotional conversations, often combating with al-
ternately clashing and complementary classical music played by
an unseen café owner. Each exchange over food and drink is like
its own world, until a sparse cut that reveals the establishment’s
geography jarringly fit it back into context. It almost feels like each
cut might not only lead us from story to story but from one Hong
Sangsoo film to another. The lack of clarification in the film gives
it a mystery similar to the curious doubling and other discreet for-
mal mischief one often finds in Hong’s work. As with his most re-
cent films, the prevailing mood here is melancholic. Hong has en-
tered his saddest period, and its beautiful rewards are bittersweet.
Other Forum titles of note include the deserved recipient of the
Best Documentary Prize, The Waldheim Waltz directed by Ruth
Above: Grass
Left: Season of the Devil
Beckermann, an expertly assembled film that incisively interro-
gates UN Secretary General and eventual Austrian president Kurt
Waldheim’s success in hiding his Nazi past while galvanizing a
bigoted public into voting for him—need I point out the relevance?
The Tree, the first fiction feature by Portuguese filmmaker André
Gil Mata, is mesmerizing (the phrase “sculpting in time” came
to mind) and unlike anything else being made right now. A final
highlight is Ted Fendt’s sophomore feature Classical Period, which
bends his serio-deadpan-comic styling into something more aus-
tere. Again focusing on a handful of nerdy, socially unconven-
tional intellectuals, Fendt focuses less on the poignant humour
of awkward exchanges and more on the gaps between his char-
acters, whose interactions mostly consist of recitations of texts
or recounting historical anecdotes. If knowledge is power, then
Cal (Calvin Engime, back from Short Stay [2016] with his Scopa
card deck) must be king. Whether it’s convincingly debunking the
worth of Frank Lloyd Wright, deconstructing the Inferno or refer-
encing 16th-century Catholic martyrs, he seems to know it all. In
fact, he’s most at home in a formal Dante discussion group where
such insight is currency. Fellow group member Evelyn (Evelyn
Emile) is less fluent in memorized details and more troubled in her
academic pursuits. Is she less intelligent or just less consumptive,
absorbing words and ideas with more care and less certainty?
Classical Period complicates its characters without needing to
explicitly reveal their psychology. Much like in Fendt’s beloved
Straub–Huillet, figures are fixed in frame and read texts which
are given their own cinematic life and conjure (hi)stories. The lo-
fi 16mm aesthetic, murkier and rougher here than in Short Stay,
distances its Philadelphia locale and the people therein from their
contemporaneity. Fixed shots give way to pans that open the world
up to reality even as its characters seem further removed from it.
Classical Period is a love letter to deep engagement with literature
and history just as it is equally a reminder to live in the real world—
the ultimate translation of perception into being. Not a bad thing
to keep in mind.
57
TV or Not TV | By Kate Rennebohm

Chronicles of
Deaths Forestalled
The Leftovers

58
 Televisual and serialized storytelling has long been haunted by
a Scheherazadean sense of the relation between storytelling and
death. Like that famous narrator’s death-defying fabrications in
Arabian Nights, the longer a television show goes on, the more it re-
minds us that an inevitable end is coming, every new episode only
forestalling this death-like cessation of its characters and fictional
world. Damon Lindelof, he of the generation of television writers
that became “showrunners,” leans into this connection more than
most. In the finale of his and Carlton Cuse’s influential Lost (2004-
2010), still famously (and only semi-fairly) hated many years after
the fact, the pair outraged viewers by directly confronting the link
between death and the end of a story: the episode organized itself
around the “revelation” that, eventually, all of these characters
will die (no doubt reminding audience members that, hey, you’re
going to die one day, too).
In retrospect, Lindelof’s evident fascination with the link be-
tween death and storytelling carries over from Lost to his and Tom
Perrotta’s The Leftovers (2014-2017), which recently concluded its
stellar three-season run. Adapted from Perrotta’s 2011 book, The
Leftovers is set in a contemporary world that is recognizably our
own, but for one major diference: on October 14, 2011, two per-
cent of the world’s population (140 million people) blinked out of
existence, leaving a gutted and emotionally disintegrating human
race behind. The show centres on the Garvey family, headed by
police chief Kevin (Justin Theroux), and his eventual love interest
Nora (Carrie Coon), as they struggle through post-Rapture life in
Mapleton, New York: while Nora deals with her grief and rage over
the two children and husband she lost to the “sudden departure,”
Kevin battles with the local chapter of the Guilty Remnant, the
cult that his wife Laurie (Amy Brenneman) has left him for.
While the show had already diverged from Perrotta’s book over
the course of this first season, the real departure came in season
two, when every major character uprooted and moved to a small
town in Texas and the show introduced a new, African-American
family, the Murphys, as co-leads. Per the general consensus, this
turn was show-defining: season two marked the moment where
The Leftovers suddenly became the best thing on television. Also
per the general consensus, secret-sauce credit for this narrative
overhaul belongs to Mimi Leder, an AFI graduate and veteran of
large-scale Hollywood action films who had joined the show as a
director midway through season one and, with season two, became
Lindelof and Perrotta’s acknowledged third co-runner, eventually
directing over a third of the show’s 28 episodes.
While never absent, the intertwined themes of storytelling and
death take centre stage in The Leftovers’ third and final season: se-
quences with two characters sitting and facing one another, as one
tells the other a long unbroken story, emerge as a sort of emblem
for the season over its eight episodes. The fact that such sequenc-
es might not strike one as formally unusual—shot-reverse shot
being the workhorse of the cinematic workshop—goes some way
toward illustrating the show’s remarkable assuredness in its own
approach to storytelling. The first few episodes, for example, al-
most revel in providing the audience with scenarios that seem im-
possibly disconnected. The premiere catches us up on Kevin and
Nora’s life in Texas as the seventh anniversary of the departure
approaches, but ends with an unexplained sequence of a much old-
er Nora in a diferent country—she’s now called Sarah and claims
she’s never heard of Kevin. The second episode concludes with an
equally context-less sequence in which a group of horse-riding
women in the Australian Outback kidnap and murder an asshole
police chief, who is named—wait for it—Kevin. In the next episode,
an unknown man confronts Kevin Garvey Sr. (Scott Glenn), again
in the Outback; the man asks a question about the preferability of
killing a child or curing cancer, and then lights himself on fire.
The seeming nonchalance with which the show brings these
various threads together over the remaining episodes is breath-
taking; the same can be said for the show’s location shooting in
Australia, where much of the third season is set. The vertiginous
movement between the small-scale and the large-scale—between
the emotional devastations of the personal and the seeming grand
significance of the global—ultimately defines what The Leftovers is
doing throughout. Unlike the other major television event of 2017,
David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Return (which I
wrote about in Cinema Scope 71 and 72), The Leftovers doesn’t blow
up or abandon the norms of “quality” or “prestige” television—
rather, it quietly deranges them. While the show appears to stick
to the prestige mandate of a consistent tone and homogenous aes-
thetic, Leder et al. often use this guise simply to lend coherency
to the show’s unexplained events and narrative leaps. Similarly,
in organizing episodes around a single character’s experience,
The Leftovers inflects each hour with remarkably diferent formal
models and reference points, pushing against any ostensible sense
of homogeneity. In doing so, each episode invariably calls up other
modes of narrative or storytelling for thematic investigation.
In episode two, “Don’t Be Ridiculous,” for instance, Nora and
her inconsolable rage-grief are pitted against the sitcom’s aggres-
sive cheerfulness as Perfect Strangers actor Mark Linn-Baker
(playing himself) contacts Nora on behalf of a group that claims
to be able to “send people through” to the same location as the
departures, while that ’80s television show’s hilariously incon-
sonant theme song plays throughout. (The Leftovers’ incredibly
sharp music choices often lie at the heart of its humour and self-
referentiality.) In “G’Day Melbourne” (episode four), the visual
and musical ur-text for Kevin and Nora’s disintegrating relation-
ship is the music video for a-ha’s 1985 hit “Take On Me,” with its
depiction of a couple literally struggling to share the same world
(the uncharacteristic graininess of the episode’s final shot hints
at the video’s animation style). With overtly restaged scenes and
an appearance by David Gulpilil, “Crazy Whitefella Thinking”
(episode three) draws explicitly on Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout
(1971)—a choice that heightens the episode’s clear-eyed sense of
white people’s long history of taking stories, and more, that don’t
59
belong to them. The fifth episode ofers up a hilarious but mirac-
ulously uncynical take on religion (another narrative form) as
Nora’s preacher brother Matt Jamison (Christopher Eccleston)
finds himself on an overnight ferry populated by a man claiming
to be God and a modern-day lion-worshipping sex cult. Questions
of what religion can and cannot ofer to sufering people, embodied
here in the terminally ill Matt, abound.
The show’s tactic of framing individual episodes by diferent
characters’ otherwise often opaque psychologies becomes most
overt in episode seven, the Kevin-centric “The Most Powerful
Man in the World.” Like the previous season’s “International
Assassin,” this episode largely takes place in a world that may be
either a purgatorial afterlife, a complex self-delusion of the pos-
sibly mentally ill Kevin, or both. Via The Leftovers’ characteristic
agnosticism about determining what is and isn’t real, the show
(sort of) establishes in the second season that Kevin can die, go to
this other world, and then return. Picking this thread up again in
“The Most Powerful Man,” the series paints this space as Kevin’s
fantasy: it serves the impossible need of both freeing Kevin from
responsibility (the weight of partnerhood and fatherhood torment
him, and in this trip to the other world he has just successfully
outlawed marriage and family) and giving him all the power in
the world: he is now both the president of the US and his own twin
brother, out to assassinate the president. But throughout the sea-
son, Lindelof and crew have indeed played with the possibility that
Kevin actually is some kind of saviour (as proclaimed by Matt in
the “gospel” he is writing about Kevin’s extra-real exploits), and
that he will have some crucial role to play in preventing a threaten-
ing catastrophe, harbingered in the soon-to-arrive seventh anni-
versary of the sudden departure. Then, late in “The Most Powerful
Man,” the team ditches both Kevin’s potential saviour-status and
impending catastrophe with astonishing casualness, via a charac-
ter’s not-unkind question to both Kevin and the audience: Do you
really believe any of this?
Repudiating a lead character’s show-hinging significance at the
eleventh hour is a risky move, to the say the least, and it’s a marker
of The Leftovers’ conceptual and narrative strength that it makes
such a move seem both elegant in passing and inevitable in retro-
spect. The upending of Kevin’s diegetic importance is of a piece
with one of the show’s structuring traits, and one that the third
season ultimately returns to in its last episodes: particularly after
the first season, The Leftovers was willing to circumscribe its os-
tensible protagonist’s story—Kevin’s damaged white masculinity
and attendant hero/escape fantasies—as only one among many
kinds of stories, all equally worth telling.
This impulse is there in “Most Powerful Man” (the title takes on
a diferent meaning when it becomes clear that Kevin is entirely
surrounded by women who have more knowledge and power than
he does), just as it was in season two’s story reboot. It begins in
earnest in the third season with episode six, the Laurie-focused
“Certified,” through which Kevin’s ex-wife moves with seemingly
no plot arc of her own, over and over playing a receptive audience
for others: to a woman with five dead children who just wants to
60
know where they left their missing shoes, or to Nora, who has de-
cided to “go through” in Mark Linn-Baker’s departure machine,
knowing full well that this may simply mean her death. (All of the
performances on The Leftovers are top-notch, and it says some-
thing that Brenneman, in these repeated scenes of muted, self-de-
nying shock at everyone else’s horrors, here reaches the level of
series MVPs Theroux and Coon.)
The final scene of the episode turns into one of the show’s most
unmooring, devastating reveals, as it dawns on the viewer that
Laurie has been (possibly) taking her leave of the world, preparing
for a suicide that will not even, in presenting itself as an accident,
make her pain retroactively evident. Where the previous scene,
in which Laurie seems to give her blessing to Kevin for his oth-
er-world trip/possible suicide, at first reads as an event in Kevin’s
story, it is now revealed as a trace left by Laurie’s: utterly private,
even to the audience, Laurie’s goodbye emerges only faintly in
her questions about someone else’s story (to Kevin, about dying:
“Are you afraid?”). Unlike Kevin’s fantasies of conquering death
through grisly (self-)violence—that not-uncommon trope of both
TV and movies—in Laurie’s absence of fantasies, in her embodi-
ment of the damage done in being an audience to other’s stories,
The Leftovers calls up something much rarer: a limitless loneli-
ness, unbearable for not being tellable.
From this abyss, the series’ finale returns to storytelling, again
reframing what had seemed to be Kevin’s story into someone
else’s. “The Book of Nora” begins with Nora climbing into the de-
parture machine, but leaves open the question as to whether she
goes through with “going through.” The episode then returns to
the final scene of the season opener, with Nora now many years
older and apparently living in Australia. With Leder helming the
episode (she’s directed all three finales), “The Book of Nora” reads
like an inversion of the show (and television’s) tradition of literally
blowing everything up in season finales. A very quiet and at first
strange episode, it features a lot of scenes of Nora riding her bike,
falling down, and fighting with a broken bathroom door. Coon’s
character on The Leftovers has always been the one for whom
“having a story” has been a horror: as for all grievers, the weight
of having to tell, over and over, what grieves her becomes its own
source of agony. In turn, this informs Nora’s radical hatred of the
fact that others might have stories that comfort them: she is a de-
frauder of faked departures by trade and calling.
But by the end of “The Book of Nora,” in another scene of face-
to-face storytelling, Nora seems to have come to the point where
she can tell this kind of story. She sits with Kevin and narrates a
belief-testing tale about her visit to the land of the departed, where
she found her family happy without her, and so she came back.
As The Leftovers ends with this scene, it doesn’t make Nora into
Scheherazade, cheating death or denying its finitude via an incon-
clusive story, so much as it makes death a natural companion for
storytelling rather than an adversary. What’s left at the end of The
Leftovers are no other worlds to escape to, no certainties, but just
this scene of sitting with someone’s story, and the implicit ques-
tion: Do you believe any of this?

Kagero-za
Heat-Shimmer Cinema
Consider the opening scene of Zigeunerweisen (1980), the first film
in Suzuki Seijun’s so-called Taisho trilogy, to be emblematic of the
whole, as it models the kind of mesmeric interpretive process that
viewers must re-enact in the films that follow, Kagero-za (1981)
and Yumeji (1991). Sometime in the Taisho era—the brief imperi-
al period in Japan that lasted from 1912 to 1926—two old friends
and former colleagues from a military academy listen to a record
of the Basque violinist Pablo de Sarasate playing his composition
“Zigeunerweisen” (“Gypsy Airs”). During a lull in the music, over
the crackle of the gramophone needle, someone on the recording
murmurs unintelligibly. Is it Sarasate himself? What does he say?
Why the urgent tone? The friends listen again; the mystery re-
mains. A voice calling out from the rustling of the past, the mean-
ing of which is impossible to discern, but which beguiles all the
more for being so indecipherable—Sarasate’s fascinating enigma
is a double for Suzuki’s own. Each film in the Taisho trilogy seems
to harbour a similarly indistinct message from the past that eludes
resolution even as it taunts the viewer (or listener) with the prom-
ise of significance.
This spectral, transfixing quality is absent entirely from the
brilliantly demented B-pictures like Gate of Flesh (1964) or Tokyo
Drifter (1966) that Suzuki churned out at Nikkatsu in the ’60s,
DVD Bonus | By Sean Rogers
Suzuki Seijun’s Taisho Trilogy
which made him a cause célèbre among cinephiles and on which
his reputation still largely rests. In the wake of Suzuki’s passing
in February 2017, many of those films are finding renewed life: rep
houses continue to book the extensive retrospective that began
touring before his death, and little-seen highlights from Suzuki’s
back catalogue are receiving the deluxe Blu-ray box-set treat-
ment, including wide-ranging selections from his ’60s “youth”
and action movies. But none of Suzuki’s films benefit more from
the opportunity for repeated viewing than the puzzling, seductive
Taisho trilogy, which is the first set of Suzuki’s films that Arrow
Video has lovingly re-issued, a recondite choice whose mysteries
prove as bedevilling as Sarasate’s sotto voce.
The trilogy is distinct from the rest of Suzuki’s career, a lan-
guorous parenthesis between his ferociously overripe genre pic-
tures in the ’60s and his duo of involute late-period summas, Pistol
Opera (2001) and Princess Raccoon (2006). But even if the Taisho
pictures seem a world apart from the blunt widescreen pleasures
of delirious pulp like Kanto Wanderer (1963) or Youth of the Beast
(1963), these early works do exhibit similar tendencies toward the
“incomprehensible,” as Nikkatsu’s president infamously com-
plained of Suzuki’s mannerist, abstracted Branded to Kill (1967).
(“A film is the result of an explosion of feelings and emotions,”
61
Suzuki has said, “and it’s completely unnecessary to supply it with
arguments.”) The director’s wilful abstruseness got him canned
from Nikkatsu and blacklisted by the industry as a whole, but not
before he completed one last television film for the studio: Good
Evening Dear Husband: A Duel (1968), in which a love triangle in a
remote setting turns deadly over and over again, before the whole
disorienting roundelay of lust and vengeance is revealed to have
taken place in a dream.
Though Suzuki’s enforced sabbatical from feature filmmaking
ended with A Story of Love and Sadness in 1977, it is this made-for-
TV one-of that presents the clearest continuity between Suzuki’s
hothouse studio work and the oneiric, sinister, bizarrely horny
atmosphere of the independently produced Zigeunerweisen, the
film that marked Suzuki’s return to critical esteem a dozen years
later. A blood-red crab superimposed on a dead woman’s crotch, a
bowl of pork fat grotesquely overfilled, a tongue erotically licking
an eyeball in close-up, a man buried to the neck below riotously
flourishing cherry blossoms—these visual flourishes originate
entirely with the filmmaker, rather than the lean and fragment-
ed short stories by the Taisho-era modernist Uchida Hyakken
that serve as the film’s source material. Uchida’s “The Sarasate
Disk” contributes the bulk of the narrative, which tracks the wa-
vering friendship between Aochi (Fujita Toshiya, director of Lady
Snowblood [1973]) and Nakasago (Harada Yoshio) over the bet-
ter part of a decade. After the opening sequence with Sarasate’s
record, the straightlaced Aochi arrives at the seaside, where he
provides testimony to local oicials to get the Mephistophelian
Nakasago of the hook for a local woman’s death; the two then take
up with O-Ine (Otani Naoko), a grieving geisha whose tale of her
suicide brother’s strangely pink bones will gnaw at the characters
for the rest of the film. Aochi returns from this unsettling dalli-
ance to his Westernized life—complete with thoroughly modern
wife (Ohkusu Michiyo) and a professorship in German studies—
and the next time he sees his itinerant friend, Nakasago has mar-
ried Sono, a demure, traditional Japanese girl who is a dead ringer
for O-Ine (unsurprising, as she is also played by Otani). When Sono
dies, perhaps because of her husband’s neglect, Nakasago per-
versely hires O-Ine to nurse his young daughter Toyoko (Makishi
Kisako), and Aochi bears witness as his friend becomes increas-
ingly unhinged, up to—and even, eerily, after—his death.
Suzuki and screenwriter Tanaka Yozo, who scripted all the
films of the trilogy, delight in setting up mysteries that are never
resolved: Did Nakasago murder the woman on the beach? Did he
seduce Aochi’s wife? Did Aochi himself sleep with Sono, or was she
a ghost? And can Nakasago reclaim his daughter from O-Ine, even
from beyond the grave? In Kagero-za, these kind of uncertainties
proliferate even further. Adapted from Kyoka Izumi’s eponymous
novel (as well as his similarly folkloric, supernatural-tinged short
stories), the film boasts a title that has been translated variously as
“The Gossamer Stage,” “Heat-Haze Theatre,” and “Heat-Shimmer
Theatre”—all these renderings highlighting both the conscious
theatricality and artifice of the events staged therein, as well as the
diiculty of discerning what actually occurs, as though each scene
were a kind of mirage.
62
The film’s scenario plays out in the final year of the Taisho era,
as the playwright Matsuzaki (’70s tough guy Matsuda Yusaku,
playing blank-eyed and gormless) tells his overweening patron
Tamawaki (Nakamura Katsuo) of his peculiar encounters with
a woman who turns out to be Tamawaki’s secretive new wife,
Shinako (Ohkusu Michiyo, embodying the polar opposite of her
“modern girl” in Zigeunerweisen), who is perhaps the spirit of
Tamawaki’s bewitching first wife Ine (Kusuda Eriko), a German
emigré. As in Zigeunerweisen, a triangle ensues: Shinako pursues
Matsuzaki, who remains fascinated with the mystery and exoti-
cism of the ghostly Ine, while Tamawaki coyly teases and outright
threatens Matsuzaki with his knowledge of the truth about both
women. At film’s end, the characters watch a troupe of child actors
dramatize their elaborate stories, until the stage collapses and
Matsuzaki’s soul seems to get shunted to some other realm that is
hung with shockingly gory, poster-sized paintings of beheadings,
flayings, and disembowellings, ripped from scenes of kabuki thea-
tre by the Meiji-era artist Ekin.
While Kagero-za ends with an unexpected and unnerving
glimpse into some kind of afterlife, Yumeji begins a little more re-
assuringly, with events that soon get explicitly figured as a dream—
even if the protagonist dreams of a duel in which he gets shot in
the head. After all, the yume from Yumeji also means “dream,” as
the renowned real-life painter Yumeji Takehisa (played by former
J-pop heartthrob Sawada Kenji) muses toward the end of the film,
which fictionalizes a period in his life from around 1918. Beloved
for his prints of “Yumeji-style beauties” and infamous for his love
afairs, Yumeji travels to the coastal city of Kanazawa to await his
current conquest, the tubercular, upper-crust Hikono (Miyazaki
Masumi), only to start a new fling with former bondage model Oyo
(Hirota Leona), both women whom figured large in the historical
artist’s life. Suzuki’s Yumeji, though, becomes particularly preoc-
cupied with Tomoyo (Mariya Tomoko), a melancholy bourgeoise
patrolling the waters in a bright-yellow rowboat, looking for the
corpse of her impetuous husband Wakiya (Harada Yoshio again,
even more untamed than his gypsy lothario in Zigeunerweisen),
who may have been murdered by a vengeful lover roaming the
mountainside, Onimatsu (Hasegawa Kazuhiko, director of The
Man Who Stole the Sun [1979]). Yumeji wants Tomoyo to model
for him, but she demurs, disapproving of the “vulgar” women he
draws; Wakiya plans to murder the artist, if he ever completes her
portrait. As in Zigeunerweisen and Kagero-za, the film closes with
the prospect of Yumeji’s transportation across a body of water
to a dimension of death or dream, this time ferried there by “the
devil” Onimatsu.
Onimatsu joins Kagero-za’s devious wife Shinako and
Zigeunerweisen’s young Toyoko, among others in the trilogy, as
familiar spirits who shuttle between waking life and various neth-
erworlds, blurring the boundary between the real and fantastic.
Suzuki makes a point of erasing all such distinctions throughout
these three mercurial films, to the point that each film begins to
look like a palimpsest of the others, conspicuously repeating the
same patterns in vertiginous new variations. Love triangles and
doppelgängers recur, of course, as does the panoply of uncanny and
 Kagero-za
unexpected compositions, and the presence of the rowdy Harada
and chameleonic Ohkusu (he plays an anarchist in Kagero-za, she
a landlady in Yumeji—significantly, her memories prompt the use
of Umebayashi Shigeru’s plaintive “Yumeji’s Theme,” made only
more aching and resonant now thanks to its later appearance in
In the Mood for Love [2000]). But most consistently, the trilogy
compulsively returns to scenes of death and Eros—obsessions that
derive in part from the Taisho era’s artistic culture, which mixed
Gothic and romantic impulses in equal measure. (“Concepts such
as transience, nihilism and decay have been part of the Japanese
emotional world for centuries,” Suzuki said. “During the Meiji era
and the Showa era, they were less prominent, but their colours
dominated the Taisho era.”)
Born in 1923, near the close of the Taisho years, Suzuki can have
had no real recollection of the era. And while his trilogy traics in
many of the tensions that are thought to characterize this tran-
sitional period—between hedonism and conservatism, Western
modernity and Japanese tradition, women’s liberation and en-
trenched patriarchy, incipient liberalism and looming totalitari-
anism (in arts and culture as well as politics)—it doesn’t ofer a de-
tailed recreation or even an impressionistic treatment of that past
so much as a kind of impossible remembering, using disjunctive
ruptures of onscreen time and space to create a slippage between
the realms of death, dream, and faulty memory. “The Taisho era
is of interest to Suzuki almost as a poetic concept rather than
an historical period,” writes Tom Vick in his thoughtful mono-
graph Time and Place Are Nonsense: The Films of Seijun Suzuki—a
notion borne out by the fact that Suzuki adapts the work, life
and (freely fantasized) spirit of Taisho-era artists like Uchida,
Kyoka, and Yumeji rather than conforming to the conventions of
historical drama.
The one feint that Suzuki may make towards historical signif-
icance is oblique, at best. As Tony Rayns points out in his helpful
video introductions on the box set, these films, and particularly
the fatalistic Kagero-za, are sufused with the sense of an ending:
their obsession with life’s imperceptible transition to dream or
to death suggests the passing of the comparatively liberal Taisho
era into the Showa era’s preparations for war. Though the films
take place before the ascendance of Japanese fascism, they also
Zigeunerweisen
cannot but look forward to it, often by way of a fascination with
Germany. In Zigeunerweisen, Aochi is and Nakasago has been a
professor of German at a military academy—a confluence too neat
to be overlooked. In Kagero-za, Ine is at once the German wife of
the European-educated Tamawaki and the “inner self” of the echt-
Japanese countess Shinako, as though some Teutonic spirit were
instilled in the nation’s ruling class. And the historical Yumeji, af-
ter the events of Suzuki’s film, would actually travel to Germany
and witness the brutal rise of Nazism firsthand, shortly before his
death. Japan need not look to Germany for historical lessons about
militarist authoritarianism, of course, but one gets the sense that
the spectre of fascism is one of the ghosts that calls out from the
past in this trilogy, like Sarasate on his record.
If that recording of Sarasate heard at the very opening of
Zigeunerweisen is one emblem of Suzuki’s trilogy, there is anoth-
er at its very close. As Yumeji ends, the camera pulls back from a
folding screen on which the artist has painted an image of Princess
Tatsuta, the Shinto goddess of harvest and the changing leaves.
Her image has haunted Yumeji from the beginning of the film,
when he dreams of a woman suspended in a tree, facing away from
him, inaccessible, as so many characters in Suzuki’s trilogy tend
to be. In the painting, with her blood-red kimono spilling to the
edge of the frame and her eyes closed as though in contemplation,
she cranes her neck at an awkward angle so that her back remains
turned, withholding herself from the viewer at the same time
that she reveals her face (shades of O-Ine, Ine, Tomoyo, and oth-
ers). “She’s the crowning woman of my life,” the painter once said.
“She’s Miss Nippon!”
Yumeji’s image of Princess Tatsuta mirrors Suzuki’s own
crowning achievement in completing his trilogy: Suzuki seiz-
es on febrile, impossible visions to construct these films, just
as Yumeji wrests the haunting picture of the deity out of his
dream world and sets it down on canvas. In the original paint-
ing, Princess Tatsuta towers above even Mount Fuji, at once an
epically scaled figure of national identity (Miss Nippon!) and a
repository of private significance to the artist. Suzuki’s trilogy
too serves as a kind of national epic: a portrait of Japan, though
carried out in terms that are intensely personal and wilfully
(wonderfully) hermetic.
63
Global Discoveries on DVD | By Jonathan Rosenbaum
A Few Peripheral Matters
Let me start by paraphrasing and slight-
ly expanding a comment of mine appended
to my 2017 ten-best list for DVD Beaver. A
major reason for listing Criterion’s Othello
first is that it includes the digital premieres
of not one, not two, but three Orson Welles
features: both of his edits of Othello avail-
able with his own soundtracks, carried out
respectively in 1952 and 1955 and heard
for the first time in the US in several dec-
ades, and Filming Othello (1979), his last
completed feature.
Fans of Mudbound (2017) like myself who
want to get acquainted with Dee Rees’ pre-
vious work should check out the second of
her three previous features, Pariah (2011),
available inexpensively in both DVD and
Blu-ray formats. This autobiographical look
at the tribulations of a gay black teenager
and her family, shot in a very diferent style
from Mudbound (much more documentary-
like), is beautifully and richly acted by its
lead, Adepero Oduye—though I wonder if
the use of Brooklyn rather than Rees’ native
Nashville as a location (occasioned, I would
guess, by the services of Spike Lee as execu-
tive producer) made any significant difer-
ences in terms of Rees’ script and/or charac-
ters. (I also wonder where she made the 2007
short with the same title, which isn’t includ-
ed among the extras.)
With your indulgence, I’d like to propound
a crackpot theory of mine about why “flawed,”
truncated or never-completed masterpiec-
es—e.g., Welles’ Mr. Arkadin (1955), the orig-
inal Blade Runner (1982), Billy Wilder’s The
Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), and
Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno—tend to
be preferred nowadays by both cinephiles
and the companies that produce DVDs and
Blu-rays to such relatively flawless master-
pieces as Chimes at Midnight (1965), 2001:
A Space Odyssey (1968), Avanti! (1972), and
The Wages of Fear (1953): simply because
more spinof products can be derived from
64
the former, a boon to buyers and sellers alike.
The studios have already discovered ways of
selling the same product repeatedly to the
same individuals: first on VHS, then on DVD,
finally (or is it only semi-finally?) on Blu-ray;
and first in a fucked-up release version, then
in an actual or alleged “director’s cut,” and
finally or semi-finally in a new and improved
something-or-other. Maybe this is just a hal-
lucination on my part, but it seems like every
season nowadays, a fresh edition of Wilder’s
truncated Sherlock Homes and/or Clouzot’s
never-finished Inferno turns up in the mail,
and this particular quarter has given me
both, from Masters of Cinema and Arrow
Academy, respectively. (I’m actually far
more interested in seeing Clouzot’s 1956 The
Mystery of Picasso all the way through for the
first time from the same Arrow Academy la-
bel, but alas, all my eforts to rejig my Oppo
player to play this Blu-ray failed.)
Do these new editions disclose new se-
crets or ofer new riches not found in their
predecessors? I haven’t yet found the stam-
ina to check, but I suspect that the new dis-
coveries, if there are any, are likely to be less
than monumental, and that it’s really the
impulse that counts. I also presume this is
why Criterion’s so-called The Complete Mr.
Arkadin turned out to be so popular and got
so much press coverage. The set was so titled
because it’s widely believed to be both possi-
ble and desirable to have a “complete” (that
is, collectible because artificially finished or
at least inflated like an inner tube) version of
something that Orson Welles himself regard-
ed as incomplete and unfinished, with the
Munich Film Museum’s Stefan Drössler on
hand to service the so-called “completists”
and to silence all the Wellesians such as
François Thomas or myself who are more in-
terested in what Welles had in mind than in
what might “play” better commercially and
conventionally. In this fashion, archivists
and viewers can now join forces in carrying
out the “polishing” work that was once duti-
fully performed by studio employees.
I don’t mean to suggest by any of this that
there might not also be legitimate and not
merely mercenary reasons for preferring The
Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and perhaps
even Fedora (1978) to Avanti! (although I would
scof or shake my head at anyone who would
find Inferno preferable to The Wages of Fear).
My point, in any case, is that the allure of do-it-
yourself (or imagine-it-yourself) masterpiec-
es is apparently irresistible to vendors and
customers alike.
According to Wikipedia, Jet Pilot (1957)—
starring John Wayne as an Air Force colonel
and Janet Leigh as (I kid you not) a Russian
pilot/spy—“was reportedly Howard Hughes’
favorite film, one he watched repeatedly in
his later years.” Another imagined master-
piece? Josef von Sternberg was the credit-
ed director, and apart from his uncredited
work on Duel in the Sun (1946), it’s his only
work in colour. He worked on it from October
1949 until February 1950, before half a doz-
en other directors—including screenwriter
Jules Furthman, Don Siegel, and Hughes
himself—were brought on during the seven
years Hughes tinkered and dithered with the
film. (During the time I was able to spend
with Leigh, thanks to my work on the re-
edited Touch of Evil [1958], she told me she was
only willing to go on a date with Hughes if she
could bring along her parents as chaperones,
and during the same period Hughes frequent-
ly had her under surveillance.) The first time
I saw it, at age 14, it already looked quite dat-
ed (despite the fact that its sexual symbolism
involving planes was seven years ahead of Dr.
Strangelove ), and it has generally been ignored
because it’s so demented, campy, and down-
right stupid—though the colours are often
ravishing, Leigh’s wardrobe is borderline sur-
realist, and the comic eroticism fairly singular.
(Who can ever forget the sounds of passing jets
punctuating Leigh’s early striptease?)
 Even Wayne was embarrassed by this
movie, and the Conseil des Dix in Cahiers
du Cinéma no. 86 was far from enthusias-
tic—Godard and Rohmer each accorded it
two stars, Rivette only one, and Georges
Sadoul none (with only Trufaut’s pal Robert
Lachenay defiantly giving it four)—though
I was surprised to discover that on the
same critical chart that month, Vincente
Minnelli’s The Cobweb, which I’ve generally
regarded as good, fared slightly worse. But
Luc Moullet’s review of Jet Pilot in the same
issue, entitled “Sainte Janet,” ofered at least
a half-hearted defence, linking the film’s
eroticism to that of The Fountainhead (1949),
noting the two films’ shared hatred for col-
lectivity, and dryly concluding, “Sternberg
amuses himself. Therefore, it’s serious.”
If you’re interested, you can get a no-frills
DVD of this jaw-dropping monstrosity in
Universal’s Vault Series.
I’ve never been much of a fan of Louis
Malle’s 1958 Elevator to the Gallows, but
Criterion’s “Blu-ray Special Edition” goaded
me into revisiting my capsule review for the
Chicago Reader and checking out the various
special features devoted to the Miles Davis
score (which has also always struck me as
disappointing). Here’s the former: “The de-
but feature of Louis Malle, this eicient but
soulless 1957 thriller is often classified as
part of the French New Wave, though that
reputation seems unwarranted. The defin-
ing situation—an adulterer who’s just com-
mitted a murder (Maurice Ronet) patiently
tries to pry his way out of a stuck elevator—
shows the influence of Robert Bresson, for
whom Malle worked as an assistant. There’s
also some of the youthful insolence of Roger
Vadim (And God Created Woman) when two
young lovers take the killer’s car for a joyride.
But the incompatibility of these influences
suggests how little Malle’s absorbed them,
though he gives Jeanne Moreau a juicy early
role as the murder victim’s wife and engages
Miles Davis to play the score (used conven-
tionally as mood music).”
Thanks to the skillful commentaries of
jazz critic Gary Giddins and trumpeter Jon
Faddis, I’m now willing to concede both the
inadequacy of my parenthetical demurral
and the musical importance of Davis’ in-
novatively conceived score (improvised on
the spot during a screening, rather like Neil
Young’s much later score for Jarmusch’s
Dead Man [1995]), which launched the bold
modal adventures that would subsequent-
ly blossom into the albums Milestones and
Kind of Blue. My only complaint about these
extras is that the otherwise excellent inter-
view with French pianist René Urtreger, who
freely admits that his contributions to the
score are inconsequential, doesn’t ofer any
musical examples of what his improvising
elsewhere was (and is) like; even as a hard-
core jazz fan who lived in Paris for five years,
I’m at a loss to describe his work.
It’s hard for me to find much to say about
Sayonara (1957), out now on a Twilight Time
Blu-ray, beyond calling it a well-intentioned
relic that makes me nostalgic for an era when
Americans—or at least some of them—were
suiciently embarrassed about their ignorance
of foreign cultures to want to address this prob-
lem, even in incremental ways. One of those
Americans was Marlon Brando, who, as we
learn from Julie Kirgo’s accompanying essay,
had the rather brilliant idea of making his char-
acter—an Air Force Major who falls in love with
a Japanese actress and gradually overcomes
his xenophobic prejudices—a Southerner, and
even giving him a heavy accent.
One of those Americans who apparently
wasn’t embarrassed was Truman Capote,
who later wrote about his famous on-
location interview with Brando for The New
Yorker, “The Duke in His Domain,” that,
contrary to Brando himself, he considered
it a “sympathetic” account “of a wounded
young man who is a genius, but not markedly
intelligent.” Yet as a sample of Capote’s own
marked (and Southern) intelligence, consid-
er Donald Richie’s account of him on his first
visit to Japan, to interview Brando, in The
Japan Journals 1947-2004: “What I did not
understand about Truman was how anyone
could go to a new country, any country, and
pay so little attention to it. He was supposed
to be some sort of reporter, at least he was
reporting for his magazine, but he stayed
entirely in the Imperial [Hotel], ate there,
slept there. And, he never asked a ques-
tion.” After Capote subsequently cancelled
shopping with Richie and explained that he
had no interest in Japan, he added, “‘Look,
I have seen Japan. And I may just as well
tell you that I do not like a country that has
little cocks.’”
65
 In my last column, I recommended a CD
box set devoted to the Frederick Hollander
score for The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953).
This time around, I’d like to call atten-
tion to The Orson Welles/A. F. Lavagnino
Collaboration, the 11th CD of Angelo
Francesco Lavagnino’s movie soundtrack
scores to be released by Alhambra Records
in Germany. This is devoted to the scores of
the latter three of Welles’ four Shakespeare
films, with pride of place given to the com-
pleted but never-released 40-minute ver-
sion of The Merchant of Venice, made in
1969 for American television and never
seen because its middle reel was stolen af-
ter a single private screening in Italy. There
are also ten tracks devoted to the music for
Chimes at Midnight; Othello, which occa-
sioned Lavagnino’s first score for Welles,
gets only three tracks, drawn directly from
the film’s soundtrack. Four additional tracks
are devoted to interviews in Italian about
Lavagnino’s work with Welles.
As long as I’m branching out to audio, let
me recommend a recent half-hour interview
with Michael Anderegg about Welles and
Shakespeare, at folger.edu/shakespeare-un-
limited/orson-welles. You should also check
out his Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular
Culture, by far the best book on that subject.
While going on a delightful Luis Buñuel
binge over the December holidays, I discov-
ered I didn’t have a copy of Subida al cielo
(1952), usually known in English as Mexican
Bus Ride, and further discovered that the
easiest way of rectifying this was to order a
no-frills PAL DVD from the UK under the
title Ascent to Heaven (a literal translation
of the Spanish original). Buñuel showed an
interest at some point in adapting William
Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and this comedy
shows a few traces of its influence in spots.
Loaded with informative extras, includ-
ing a 28-page booklet, the high-definition
restoration of Cy Endfield’s 1957 Hell Drivers
is available on Blu-ray from Network (net-
workonair.com), a company in the UK that
sells Blu-rays of English features at aforda-
ble prices. The first of the director’s British
films to be released under his own name,
following his blacklisting and subsequent re-
location to the UK, Hell Drivers is one of two
Endfield films starring Stanley Baker that
shows the direct impact that Clouzot’s The
Wages of Fear had on him, as Endfield him-
66
self once told me; it also has the advantage of
a strong secondary cast that includes, among
others, Peggy Cummins, Herbert Lom,
Patrick McGoohan, Jill Ireland, and even an
early appearance of Sean Connery. Although
I’ve previously expressed some doubts about
how much the sociopolitical insights that
Endfield displayed in his early Hollywood
pictures such as The Argyle Secrets (1948)
and The Underworld Story and Try and Get
Me! (both 1950) carried over into an English
context, the extras here suggest that I might
have been wrong about this.
The most valuable extra on the Olive
Signature Blu-ray of Elaine May’s first fea-
ture A New Leaf (1971) is the Jack Ritchie sto-
ry “The Green Heart,” which May’s screen-
play is based on. This already makes this
Blu-ray edition preferable to the earlier ones
issued by both Olive and Masters of Cinema,
because the story gives us a better idea than
does any other extra of May’s original cut,
in which Matthau’s character murders Jack
Weston’s character. But it’s too bad that the
publication of this story isn’t properly co-
ordinated with Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’
essay in the same 16-page booklet, which not
only cites an incorrect description of the sto-
ry—taken from a sloppy, secondhand jour-
nalistic account of a May interview—but also
wrongly credits May with this description.
(Anyone who reads “The Green Heart”—and
I assume that Heller-Nicholas wasn’t one of
them—will know that the story isn’t “about
a banker who kills his solicitor.”) But, then
again, May freely admitted to me when I met
her in Bologna a few years ago that many false
facts about her and her career (she was born
in Chicago, not Philadelphia, and she didn’t
act in Yiddish theatre) originally came from
her own playful habit of making up whoppers
in some of her early interviews.
I still don’t have much of a fix on Alexander
Mackendrick’s auteurist identity, assum-
ing he has one, but one thing suggested by
cross-referencing his interestingly odd-
ball 1967 comedy Don’t Make Waves with
his 1957 Sweet Smell of Success is a capacity
to view the US critically and sharply as an
outsider (even though he was actually born
in Boston to parents who’d emigrated there
from Glasgow the year before). At once sexy
and disturbing, Don’t Make Waves virtually
begins with Tony Curtis’ car crashing upside
down and then exploding and virtually ends
on the same Malibu coastline with Curtis’
swimming pool collapsing and his luxuri-
ous house turning upside down and sliding
into the mud, despite the fact that the mov-
ie’s three crazy couples (Curtis and Claudia
Cardinale, Sharon Tate and Mr. Universe,
Robert Webber and Joanna Barnes) are im-
plausibly reunited or united inside the house
at the same time this catastrophe happens.
You might even say that this is a caustic
comedy about corruption, conspicuous con-
sumption, and West Coast impermanence to
match the acerbic East Coast melodrama of a
decade earlier about corruption, power, and
celebrity, with Curtis embodying some form
of the corruption in both movies.
People like me who routinely and naive-
ly think that Roberto Rossellini’s “histori-
cal” films—discounting his War Trilogy and
Europa ’51 (1952), which deal with recent or
contemporary history—begin in the mid-
’60s with La prise de pouvoir de Louis XIV
(1966) are overlooking such notable excep-
tions as The Flowers of St. Francis (1950) and
Viva l’Italia! (1961), a Giuseppe Garibaldi
biopic of sorts commissioned by the Italian
government that deals with only a short slice
of his literally colourful exploits. The latter,
perhaps the most spectacular and certainly
one of the most neglected of Rossellini’s films
(at least outside of Italy), has been given a 2K
restoration for an Arrow Academy Blu-ray,
decked out with a shorter version in English
(Garibaldi) prepared for the US market, an
audiovisual essay by Tag Gallagher, a printed
essay by Michael Pattison, and a new inter-
view with Ruggero Deodato, Rossellini’s as-
sistant on the film.
To its credit, Milestone Films has possibly
done more in its releases for our sense of his-
tory than any other digital label in the US—
but to its discredit, it sometimes does more
to make its history lessons cumbersome
and user-unfriendly with its unfathomable
methods of serving them up. Thus I was de-
lighted when they finally made my favourite
Charles Burnett film, the 12-minute When it
Rains (1995), available on its two-disc Killer
of Sheep collection, but frustrated (and often
inconvenienced) when they didn’t bother to
clarify anywhere on the package which of the
two discs it was on. Similarly, on its other-
wise well-appointed Blu-ray edition of Lois
Weber’s Shoes (1916), you may have to use a
magnifying glass in order to read the text on
the back of the jacket, and the year in which
this film was released is nowhere to be found,
even though the dates of all the extras are
given. (The same anomaly applies to their
concurrent Blu-ray release of The Dumb Girl
of Portici, co-directed by Weber the same
unlisted year as Shoes, with its own slate of
carefully dated extras.) I realize that these
problems are simply oversights, but I wish
they didn’t keep happening.
To cite only two of the fascinating histo-
ry lessons ofered by the Shoes Blu-ray: (1)
the film’s main villain, the heroine’s lazy fa-
ther, visibly spends most of his life reading,
even during his meals with his family, and
his use of books to screen out his relatives
and everything else anticipates precisely
the social uses of radio, TV, and the inter-
net by subsequent generations, not to men-
tion Donald Trump; (2) one of the extras is
Unshod Maiden (1932), a ten-minute digest
of the 70-minute Shoes with a wisecracking
and ridiculing narration, a sort of Mystery
Science Theater avant la lettre, released by
Universal only 16 years after the original—a
phenomenon skillfully glossed by Richard
Koszarski in a separate 1971 extra.
I assume it’s mere happenstance that
led Twilight Time to include in its lat-
est quartet of Blu-ray releases two hoary
Gothic romances from Fox at mid-century
(Dragonwyck, 1946, and My Cousin Rachel,
1952) and two contemporary looks at marital
dysfunction as seen through the interactions
between two couples who are best friends,
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (Paul Mazursky’s
satirical first feature, which looks consid-
erably better to me now than it did in 1969)
and Husbands and Wives (Woody Allen at
his most technically transgressive and most
ideologically predictable, yielding scenes
that look far more barren and mechanical
to me now than they did in 1992); a dialec-
tical package, in any case. In Allen’s film,
the deliberately jarring “rough” camera
movements and jump cuts serve mainly to
distract us from the clichés in the dialogue,
where lines meant to represent intelligence
are just as stereotypical as those meant to
represent stupidity. But Mazursky’s re-
sourceful and inventive découpage remains
wholly at the service of his actors/characters
and the movie’s acute observations about
some of the enduring befuddlements of
the ’60s.
67
Canadiana | By Lydia Ogwang

Hometown It’s an epidemic: the populist appeal of genre cinema is undeniable,

even here at home. In a bit of a surprise, Robin Aubert’s Les afamés

Horror won Best Canadian Feature at the 2017 Toronto International

Robin Aubert’s Les affamés
Film Festival, and then the Temps Ø People’s Choice Award at
the Festival du nouveau cinéma in Montréal. Months later, fol-
lowing a solid global festival run, the film landed a spot in TIFF’s
Canada’s Top Ten. It appears, then, that a film best described in
press kit-speak as an “arthouse horror-thriller” is the ideal token
we can put forward as our national cinematic brand. That the film
is in French only bolsters its case, distancing it from the notions
of Americanness its living-dead premise evokes. Netflix, for one,
has bought a lot more than the hype, snagging the flick for inter-
national release in a punchy acquisition reflecting the streaming
giant’s commitment to increase its spend on Canadian content
over a five-year period.
The anointment of Aubert’s fifth feature after a series of well-
received but relatively obscure eforts surely signifies something.
In the context of the “New Weird Nova Scotia” represented by
Ashley McKenzie’s Werewolf (2016) and a cluster of skilled young
storytellers emerging out of British Columbia and Ontario (Josh
Cabrita exhumed both CanCon phenomena in Cinema Scope 71 and
72, respectively), it’s worth pondering what it means that a seem-
ingly straightforward genre exercise has been so elevated within
our national cinema. But perhaps what Aubert has put together is
a singular Canadian cultural examination in a horror film’s dress.
The director is no stranger to genre. Saints-Martyrs-des-Damnés
(2005) was a surrealist horror-thriller following a tabloid repor-
ter’s uncanny visit to a small Québécois village, yielding a chaotic
smorgasbord of characters and events; with Les afamés, Aubert
returns to his hometown of Ham-Nord, banking once again on an
intimate knowledge of regional specificities. This time, he moves
outward from the one-to-one case studies of Saints-Martyrs’ local
eccentrics, fixing his gaze more on group identity and social order
in service of a microcosmic cultural study. Shifting his focus from
the damned to “the ravenous” (the film’s English-language title),
Aubert puts the cultural conditions of both the zombie constitu-

68
ent and the remaining survivors under the microscope. While the
living contend with mortal fear, frustration, and paranoia in strat-
egizing and scrambling for survival, the animated dead duly or-
chestrate terror and destruction, exhibiting a preoccupation with
the living that seems to expand beyond basic bloodlust.
The anthropological conceit is compelling: in an otherwise dili-
gently referential work that looks the part of a 21st-century zombie
flick à la Boyle or Snyder, it’s the only notable liberty the film dares
beyond its generic casings. Aubert’s living tote their respective
petits drames alongside their escape packs (and one very con-
spicuous accordion), inexorably (if pointlessly) preoccupied with
the trappings and personal failings of their pre-apocalyptic lives.
Marc-André Grondin heads the pack as the boneheaded Bonin, a
bumbling man-child turned hero, eventually accompanied by the
exceedingly nervous Tania (a sharp Monia Choukri); they’re com-
plemented by Brigitte Poupart as the unravelling businesswoman
Céline and Charlotte St-Martin as Zoe, a resilient young girl of ten.
As Aubert’s characters come to terms with new iterations of life
under duress, class and lifestyle conflicts in tow, the film studies
the fascinating emergent networks of morality and sentimentality
among them which cut through the monotony of genre: newly ap-
pointed bedfellows Tania and Bonin awkwardly stumble through
hellacious courtship tensions, with Tania eventually reaching her
boiling point over her partner’s commitment to cornball antics at
the end of the world. Elsewhere, two elderly women who join the
survivors’ army take a moment to marvel at their domestic skills
as they decide which jars of their homemade pickled goods to take
with them on the run. The tender, humanistic focus delineates the
action from run-of-the-mill Romero rehash: even amidst its faith-
fully rendered gore and copious jump scares, the film is committed
to behavioural realism.
Les afamés is at times sharply (if darkly) comic, and its char-
acters’ conduct dizzyingly ordinary despite extraordinary cir-
cumstances. The relationship between Bonin and his pal Vézina
(Didier Lucien) at the film’s open is a jolting indicator of these
tonally shifting conditions. The two exhibit the fervent rapport
of teenage delinquents hunting stray rodents for target practice,
but moments into their Wild West pantomime, they realize the
progression of the zombie epidemic is much worse than they im-
agined: in an eerie, of-speed sequence, Vézina is bitten, leading
to an emotionally afecting exchange in the back of Bonin’s pick-
up truck. Together, the two friends lament lost opportunities to
share their true feelings with family, friends, and secret objects of
afection—complete with one last healthy dose of fraternal razz-
ing—while Vézina lays dying.
The anguish doesn’t end there: facing the reality of the impend-
ing reanimation of his slain friend’s body, Bonin tasks another
survivor with the pre-emptive violent maiming of Vézina’s corpse.
It’s a harsh go, one that Bonin bears with reactive fidelity (at least
for the moment before the next crisis demands his attention) and
one that his other living companions will endure later as well. The
changing conditions of morality are on display as the living jug-
gle competing human instincts in the face of mortal danger, and
Aubert ofers a close examination of the psychological disavowals
necessary to follow through with hostile actions carried out in the
name of safety and sovereignty.
The script’s nuance extends to its interpretation of the liv-
ing dead. In a further departure from convention, Aubert gives
the zombies a rich culture and community of their own. In the
downtime punctuating new member-recruitment drives, “the
ravenous” exhibit a strange preoccupation with the artifacts and
worship rituals of the living, actively crafting a towering altar of
chairs and observing their handiwork in a trancelike state. The
makeshift structure embodies an empty monument to material-
ity at the point when it’s clear to both Aubert’s characters and his
audience that content of character is king.
The small-town setting is undoubtedly atmospheric, but it holds
thematic weight too. Aubert relocates typical horror tropes to an
idyllic natural setting where naturalism is inextricably tied to no-
tions of home, origin, and family. Ruralism and contention with
the natural world are typically the result of urban displacement
in apocalyptic scenarios, but the fact that the rural environment
is lived-in, familiar terrain for all involved raises the stakes: the
neighbourly familiarity that informs many of their interactions is
a fact of small-town Canadian life, and the characters’ command
of the space thrills with the pacing of a primetime Western. The
apocalyptic condition plays here as a perversion of natural order,
the unsettling power of the uncanny especially vivid amidst the
garishness of the greenery.
Les afamés’ spry invocation of frontier politics proposes critic-
al considerations of sovereignty discourse, land-title defence,
and cultural dominance. The setting is powerfully allusive in the
wake of Québécois separatist social politics, rendering cultural
epidemiological concerns physically visceral. The wood-panelled,
brass-knobbed homes acutely convey notions of the familial and
the domestic in a near-literal conjuring of in-our-backyard inva-
sion rhetoric. Interestingly, Aubert complicates decidedly white
Québécois sovereignty narratives with the conspicuous early in-
clusion of the endearing and exceedingly virtuous protagonist
Vézina, who is black. As is somewhat humorously custom to the
genre, he’s the first to perish with a legacy dangling somewhere
between canary in the coal mine and Magical Negro. The narra-
tive decision is a brilliant indicator of generic reference, but those
privy to the xenophobic state-sanctioned violence and Indigenous
erasure tacitly attendant to sovereigntist rhetoric may rightly
wonder: in this white Québécois nationalist milieu, what does it
mean, here, when the black guy dies first?
For diligent viewers who watch through until the end of the
credits, Aubert hides a colourful surprise: his camera surveys the
towering altar of chairs once again, but this time trains in slowly
on a parrot, anomalously and haphazardly perched on a top rail.
The bird’s aesthetic excess seems absurd and even vain amidst the
contextual ruins, a heavy-handed extension of Aubert’s commen-
tary on excess and materiality. That Aubert tucks his showy im-
agery at the very end of the film’s runtime, long after the expected
exodus of viewers, is perhaps an invocation of another classically
Canadian characteristic: bashful pride. Multiple national honours
later, and still: c’est la vie.
69
Visages villages
Agnès Varda & JR | France
The Normandy village of Pirou-Plage almost
BY ERIKA BALSOM
became a holiday destination. In 1990, prop-
erty developer Pier Invest launched a plan to
build a hotel, two tennis courts, and 80 vaca-
tion homes. The initiative would transform
the built environment and economy of this
seaside area of 1,500 inhabitants—but not as
anticipated or desired. Within a few years,
Pier Invest had declared bankruptcy, leaving
devastated local businesses and the shells of
some 30 incomplete structures in its wake.
French newspaper Le Monde called the site a
“village fantôme”; it was a stillborn commu-
nity that never lived.
Pirou-Plage is one of the rural locations
that Agnès Varda and her collaborator, thir-
tysomething street artist JR, visit in their
whimsical travelogue Visages villages. A
drone shot ofers an aerial view of its decrep-
it, graiti-clad houses before the odd couple
turns up in JR’s photo truck, a Mercedes kit-
ted out to print large-format images that are
flypasted onto buildings. They hold an after-
noon party, gathering locals with the hope
of “bringing some life” to this land blighted
by greed, “even if it’s only for a day.” To the
sounds of plucked guitar strings, families
glue their portraits to the ruins, making
pretty the ugliness.
Visages villages consists of a series of sim-
ilar episodes, filmed all across the French
countryside. Fish are pasted onto a water
tower; wives are pasted onto shipping con-
tainers. The tone is playful and light, sliding
at times into an embarrassing cutesiness,
complete with occasional rhyming dialogue,
animated credit sequences, and a running
joke about JR’s refusal to remove his sun-
glasses. Varda is charming as ever, but the
passing years seem to have upped her taste
for the saccharine—something that perfect-
ly suits the sensibility of the internationally
70
renowned street artist. He has called himself
“un artiste engageant, pas engagé”: he aims
to engage people but is not engaged in the po-
litical sense, valuing entertainment and par-
ticipation over commitment and analysis.
Perhaps this is why it is so grating that
many of these little art projects occur in lo-
cations that are, like Pirou-Plage, marked
by the exploitation, economic hardship, and
creeping precariousness characteristic of
many working-class communities in the 21st
century. Like the worst social-practice art—
the innumerable critiques of which seem not
to have reached Varda and JR—these ame-
liorative excursions seek to inject creativity
and happiness into the lives of those less for-
tunate. There is the woman who is the last in-
habitant of a row of soon-to-be-demolished
houses in a northern mining town; there are
the dockworkers of the port at Le Havre and
the employees of a hydrochloric acid factory.
This feel-good film conceives of social rela-
tions as somehow devoid of antagonism and
unpleasantness: it never mentions deindus-
trialization, outsourcing, immigration, the
decline of organized labour, or the rise of the
National Front. It keeps quiet on the many
nationwide strikes in protest of unfavoura-
ble pension reforms that have recently oc-
curred in French ports, including Le Havre,
just as it omits any reference to the long-last-
ing economic damage incurred locally in the
aftermath of the Pirou-Plage scandal.
Superficiality and light-heartedness are
not always defects in a film, but they are vex-
ing here, given that so much is clamouring for
visibility at the edges of the frame. The goats
are cute, horns or no horns, but how can
Visages villages succeed in celebrating every-
day people if it purposefully blinds itself to
the more diicult dimensions of their lives?
The film compounds the problems already
present in JR’s questionable practice, yoking
a fantasy of conviviality to a deeply nostalgic
image of the rural working class. The faces
of these places are blindingly white, blessed
with good jobs, happy marriages, secure re-
tirements, and even a helpful postman. In
their eforts to honour these small-towners,
our cosmopolitan filmmaker-tourists see
only what warms the heart.
Varda is no stranger to optimism and quirky
fun, yet this is something of a departure for
her. Films such as Les glaneurs et la glaneuse
(2000), her road-trip essay on salvage and re-
use, and Mur murs (1980), her portrait of Los
Angeles street murals, share themes with
Visages villages and are cited within it. In these
earlier works, Varda proceeds with a generous
eye to inequality and diversity, recognizing the
complexity of social life and the pervasiveness
of injustice: she weaves her wacky musings
together with a sense of solidarity and even
anger. Here, something rather diferent oc-
curs: like JR’s interventions into public space,
Visages villages stays on the surface, ofering
an amusing and enjoyable illusion that covers
over less palatable realities that lie beneath; it
obscures where it should illuminate. Does JR
wear dark sunglasses to hide a knowing glint
in his eye that would give away the falseness
of this picture? Pirou-Plage is the only literal
ghost town that Varda and JR visit, but the air-
brushed image of village life that accumulates
across Visages villages has something spooky
about it. This documentary is a fiction.
Struggle and sadness are admitted into
Visages villages as long as they are confined
to the domain of personal history, privatized
in good neoliberal fashion. With the excep-
tion of a quick visit to his 100-year-old grand-
mother, most details about JR’s life remain
a mystery. Varda, by contrast, continues the
autobiographical thread most recently famil-
iar from Les plages d’Agnès (2008), enjoying a
complexity accorded to none of the film’s oth-
er subjects. She remains clearly fascinated by
life but is welcoming of death. Her established
meditations on aging and loss extend here
to vision problems, fatigue, and diiculties
climbing the stairs—all of which are thrown
into relief by the relative youth of her collab-
orator, with whom, it must be said, she shares
a tender and sincere afection. In a reprise of
Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à part (1964), the
pair race through the Louvre, JR pushing
Varda in a wheelchair. What was once a paean
to the brazenness of youth is replayed as a mo-
ment of cross-generational camaraderie.
Godard’s presence in Visages villages is not
limited to this romp. Of Varda’s journeys into
past films and friendships, most significant is
the concluding pilgrimage to the filmmaker’s
home in Rolle, Switzerland. Why do they go?
In his tinted glasses and insuferable hat, JR
does look something like the young Godard
who appears in the film-within-a-film of
Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962). JR perhaps serves as an
aide-mémoire that prompts Varda to recon-
nect with her estranged friend. But this, too,
is merely cosmetic: JR’s gregarious shtick
couldn’t be farther from Godard’s misan-
thropic seclusion and cryptic conceptual-
ism. The thought that the duo might plaster
JLG’s surly mug on the façade of his house
is truly hilarious, but they leave the photo
truck at home and travel to Switzerland by
train. Whatever the motivation for the visit,
Varda’s moving response to Godard’s failure
to welcome them is enough to make the film
worth watching. It is the one moment when
Varda punctures the film’s otherwise pat
image of social harmony and allows some
ugly feelings to creep in. Far from the blithe
cheerfulness of those many faces plastered
on buildings, frozen into banal spectacles
of cheap public art, Varda’s countenance—
wrinkled, fleshy, embodied—shatters cliché.
In her candid and conflicted reckoning with
the unfriendliness of a friend, love, anger,
compassion, and pain exist together.
That said, I don’t blame Godard for leaving
only a private riddle written on the window
in grease pen: if JR knocked on my door, I
wouldn’t answer either.
71
Ava
Sadaf Foroughi | Iran/Canada/Qatar

“Any-space-whatever is not an abstract universal in all times, in all

places. It is a perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its
homogeneity, that is, the principle of its metric relations or the
connection of its own parts, so that the linkages can be made in an
infinite number of ways.”
—Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement Image

BY JOSH CABRITA

Made up largely of short close-ups, Sadaf
Foroughi’s debut feature Ava, winner of
the FIPRESCI prize at last year’s Toronto
International Film Festival, is modelled
forcefully and at times faultily on a con-
cept coined by former Cahiers critic Pascal
Bonitzer: décadrage (unframing), canted
compositions that are not justified by the re-
quirements of action or perception, images
geometrically detached from those that would
cumulatively create an illusion of 360-degree
space. Borrowing heavily from Bonitzer to
discuss the distinct montage styles of Dreyer
and Bresson, Deleuze contends that close-ups
with loose metric relations to the following or
preceding shots become unframed and imply
their own virtuality in the larger fiction of a
fully formed diegesis. Echoing something of
what is being evoked here, the father of Ava’s
protagonist, who by no accident is an archi-
tect, speaks a little too openly to Foroughi’s
own approach: “There’s more room for crea-
tivity in open spaces…More freedom for in-
novative designs.”
For Ava (Mahour Jabbari), an upper-
middle-class teen in Tehran beholden to a
strict routine of school and violin lessons,
the absence of open spaces—which Foroughi
interprets literally, filling each frame to the
brim and shortening the depth of field to
fix our gaze almost exclusively on positive
space—illustrates the antithesis of her fath-
er’s ideal: an enclosed network of mostly
interior locations, shuttering Ava from the
possibility of agency. Immediately aligning
the film’s narrative trajectory with that of its
protagonist’s physical enclosure, the film’s
opening image depicts Ava’s physician moth-
er shouting and signalling for her daughter to
shule from the sidewalk into the adjacent
schoolyard, away from any potential dan-
gers that could undermine the ideological
supervision of family or school. The one time
Ava is caught slipping past the pervasive
web of surveillance that surrounds her, her
mother, fearing the worst (a visit with a boy),
arranges an impromptu appointment with
a gynaecologist.
Foroughi’s most radical realignment of
space takes place in the family home, where
each fixed shot provides an entirely new per-
spective of a given room or hallway. As it’s
next to impossible to discern the totality of
the space from the fragmented compositions
alone, the layout seems to shapeshift with
each consecutive gain in our spatial infor-
mation—like a blandly ornamented Library
of Babel that expands and contracts to al-
low characters to eavesdrop through walls,
spy through the cracks between doors, and
silently tiptoe from one room into the next
without being detected. The antagonistic
forces in the film are almost omniscient
here. There’s always the possibility that Ava’s
parents lurk around corners, in the backs of
frames, and somewhere on the other side of
walls—intrusions that are concealed by the
hermetic and limited perspective that we
and the film’s protagonist share. Similarly,
when Ava arrives at the home of her friend
Melody (Shayesteh Sajadi) with the intent
of rendezvousing with the male pianist who
accompanies her violin lessons, any difer-
ences between the two residences—particu-
larly those of class—are efectively efaced by
the exacting circumscription of Foroughi’s
framing. Once again, Foroughi obscures the
power relations that invisibly alter the inter-
actions in the film, relegating these forces
to an ill-defined outer realm that exists
on an independent plane from Ava’s daily
goings on.
Given the evident thematic intentions
of the film, this unframing at first seems

72
counterintuitive: why, in the act of making a
didactic critique of a reactionary, culturally
specific milieu, would Foroughi continually
detach her protagonist from the social geog-
raphy that defines those very strictures?
While one could try to mentally sketch a
three-dimensional floor plan from the spli-
ces we’re shown in both of the above cases,
what’s crucial about Foroughi’s isolating of
each image from the next (despite their both
having taken place in the same setting) is that
it deliberately obscures the origins of Ava’s
oppression. In this environment, absence
is as much an instrument of control as direct
domination, from the unremarked upon dis-
appearance of the kitchen landline in Ava’s
home to Melody’s suspension from school
a short time after their mothers clash over
Ava’s brief disappearance. Although it is
intimated that Ava’s mother has taken ad-
vantage of her social status to pressure the
school into taking drastic action against
Melody, we, like Ava, can never be fully cer-
tain of the source of this and all the other
greater or lesser injustices visited upon her;
Foroughi simply leaves us to wonder, as
Jonathan Rosenbaum queries in a blog post
on the film, “How much of [Ava’s] pain...is
the pain of being a teenager, and how much
is it being a teenager at a particular place
and time? How much is personal and how
much is institutional, familial, cultural, so-
cial, political, architectural?”
But just as Foroughi’s visual strategy
renders opaque the origins of Ava’s oppres-
sion, so too does it ofer a means to see be-
yond them. Through artifacts hidden on the
film’s margins, we can begin to extrapolate
the existence of a heterogeneous culture
that Ava has been severed from. When the
teen responds to her mother’s tightening of
the leash by donning a pair of red Converse,
their blaring presence felt even more against
the backgrounds of bland domesticity, the
director’s thrust is clear—even as Foroughi
is wary of conflating the sneakers’ semiot-
ically signalled rebelliousness with their
Westernness, as though liberation could
only come from the outside. Like the other
American brands that can be glimpsed dur-
ing the brief exterior scenes in the film, the
Converse (although burdened with portent)
fulfill the more subtle task of pointing to-
wards a reality residing on the outskirts of
Ava’s. These and the other physical and ver-
bal markers of this other-space throughout—
the bootlegged DVDs that Ava’s classmate
barters, the casual references to Beckett and
Robin Hood, a teacher’s English grammar
lesson—demonstrate that the illusion of pure
division between cultures, whether created
by external sanctions or internal censorship,
has already been ruptured. Any subsequent
attempts to uphold it—a wall between a trad-
itionalist Here and a liberal Over There—are
entirely artificial; the boundaries have al-
ready been breached.
Herein is the film’s emancipatory propos-
ition: according to Deleuze, through some
sly abductive reasoning (the inference of
one thing from the presence of another), if
we assume the existence of virtual diegetic
space, we can postulate an endless supply
of images hovering in limbo, waiting to be
actualized from the realm of potentiality in
a countless number of ways. In visually re-
moving Ava from her contiguous confines,
Foroughi expands the imaginable space
available to her—such that even as the nar-
rative has the powerless girl at the mercy
of devastatingly claustrophobic circum-
stances, the space the viewer experiences
is malleable, plastic, subject to change. As
the geography of Ava’s life literally decreas-
es in diegetic cubic feet, the world available
to her remains potentially endless. Despite
the finite dimensions, we’re left with the im-
pression that Ava could manipulate her do-
mestic prison through an infinite number of
innovative designs.
73
 The Work
Jairus McLeary & Gethin Aldous | US
Early on in The Work, a documentary chroni-
BY MANUELA LAZIC
cling intense group therapy techniques prac-
ticed inside Folsom State Prison outside of
Sacramento, California, a man sufers a vio-
lent meltdown. He is Brian, one of three out-
side visitors that directors Jairus McLeary
and Gethin Aldous follow as they join in-
mates over a four-day course of treatment.
His distress is not an uncommon sight under
the circumstances: what is more worrisome
is his doubt regarding the ultimate benefits
of the punishing emotional labour on dis-
play. A guide puts his hand on Brian’s shoul-
der and asks him gently, “Are you willing to
simply trust the process?”
McLeary and Aldous trust the process
completely. It took several years for the film-
makers to obtain access to the high-security
prison, even though McLeary is a one-time
volunteer whose father James is the CEO
74
of the not-for-profit psychiatric group the
Inside Circle Foundation. Yet their approach
doesn’t seem encumbered by these circum-
stances; rather, it feels both immersive and
in tune with the volatile nature of their
subject. The “work” of the title involves the
participants focusing entirely on the pres-
ent moment, locking eyes with one another
to avoid retreating into themselves. In this
state, they recall painful memories and reig-
nite diicult emotions they have so far either
repressed or else expressed on the outside
through acts of extreme violence.
The filmmakers understand that these ex-
changes are intensely engrossing for those
involved, which in turn allows them to cap-
ture the inmates’ most genuine behaviours
unnoticed. The cameramen appear in each
other’s shots, foregrounding the “work” of
filmmaking and coming perilously close to
the inmates, but without ever seeming to
disturb their concentration. McLeary and
Aldous’ evident respect for the therapeutic
method, combined with their own direct-cin-
ema rigour, makes for one of the most hon-
est recent examples of the “fly on the wall”
style of documentary filmmaking, recall-
ing Allan King’s similar approach to group
therapy in Warrendale (1965). It also serves
as evidence for the efectiveness of a surpris-
ingly soft approach to the rehabilitation of
hardened criminals.
What the therapists ask of the all-male
inmates and visitors alike is to forget who
they are outside the prison walls. Rick, a
former member of the Aryan Brotherhood
now steeped in the practice, explains that
participants must try to “be who [they]
could be.” The filmmakers are well aware
of how strange the almost whimsical lan-
guage of self-help might sound when coming
from a heavily tattooed middle-aged con-
vict. Their solution to this dissonance is el-
egant and eicient: in lieu of a preconceived
narrative arc, they turn to the volunteers
from the “outside”—Charles, Chris, and the
aforementioned Brian—and begin by em-
ploying them as surrogates for the equally
baled audience.
This collapsing of distance between the
two groups is crucial to The Work’s impact.
At the beginning of the first session, Rick in-
structs the visitors to each find two “guides”
amongst the inmates and then talk to them.
Dark Cloud, an imposing Native American,
explains to his new “pupil” with a mix of
calm, regret, and disbelief that he once tried
to cut a man in half with an axe. Most of the
inmates belonged to violent gangs. Many
are serving life sentences. All, however,
readily demonstrate patience and compas-
sion when addressing their pasts. After the
daunting mysteries around their identities
fade, what remains are men of all races, ages,
and sizes calmly sitting in small circles on
simple plastic chairs.
In this intimate setting, McLeary and
Aldous reveal their layered artistic inten-
tions, which is to turn the visitors into sub-
jects as well as surrogates. When a shaken
Brian stands up to get some water, the cam-
era captures his two chosen guides high-
fiving each other: for them, watching Brian
as he tries to hide his susceptibility to fear is,
as one observes wryly, “like looking in a mir-
ror.” The parallels being set up here are not
just playful, but profound. As both cohorts
share their painful stories, The Work re-
veals itself as fully humanist, examining the
universal nature of emotional vulnerabili-
ty, as well as the intertwined diiculty and
necessity of accepting this vulnerability as
being essential to a healthy existence. Kiki,
a member of a Pacific Islander prison gang,
describes his frustrating inability to mourn
his sister’s death; he has to be reminded to
keep breathing as the facilitator, staring into
his eyes, tells him “She’s gone,” with the cer-
tainty and tenderness of a close friend. Kiki
finally collapses, his resistance gone, held up
on all sides by his companions.
What immediately follows this disclosure
of pain pushes the film even deeper into its
exploration of human psychology. The cam-
era soon catches Charles, the middle-aged fa-
ther from the outside, still sitting on his chair
in a quiet stupor, his silence in stark contrast
to the demonstratively compassionate crim-
inals. Instead of judging his apparent non-
response, the filmmakers interrogate it, and
reveal the diversity of results that the “work”
produces. Charles explains that his silence
was involuntary: he simply didn’t expect to
feel so shaken by somebody else’s emotions.
“It’s fucked up if you don’t,” Rick reassures
him. This blunt observation sums up the
film’s power as observational cinema as well
as the crux of the problem for criminals and
regular citizens alike: their reluctance to let
themselves experience their own complicat-
ed emotions, as well as the feelings of others.
With this in mind, it’s through the expe-
riences of an outsider that the film makes its
strongest argument regarding the need for a
better understanding of the psychology be-
hind criminal activity. From the beginning
of the session, Brian maintains a distance,
glibly commenting on the exciting opportu-
nity of meeting criminals as his motivation
for being there, like a morbidly fascinated
Mindhunter lead without the FBI credentials.
In this inherently performative space, where
self-presentation is a way of bravely facing
one’s demons, he shamelessly rates the in-
mates’ extremely personal declarations as
though they were acting exercises. But when
he’s confronted about his behaviour, the
tables turn. Calm questions prompt a tear-
ful rage, and he emits a terrifying scream,
before saying, “It’s like the fucking devil...
in my head, I think I’m a fucking prince…I
feel like killing someone when I feel like
this!” No longer sublimating his frustrations
through passive-aggressive contempt, he
kicks and screams like Kiki before him, his
eyes glistening throughout his secular exor-
cism. The disturbing question of how Brian’s
seething, unexamined pain might have oth-
erwise been released in his daily life hovers
over the room; it seems to find its answer
on the grave but relieved faces of the men
surrounding him.
The pre-emptive power of the work ex-
tends beyond the individual, and the film
demonstrates how its reach widens exponen-
tially with each new believer, a dynamic that
gives the film a subtle political dimension.
Near the end of the four days, Charles spon-
taneously starts crying and ofering advice
to Dante, an inmate who has been contem-
plating suicide because his girlfriend has
stopped bringing their son on her visits to
Folsom. Charles relates directly to Dante’s
story of “fatherless sons” because he didn’t
know his own father, but what’s more inter-
esting is the impact that Charles’ new sense
of openness has on Dante. Eventually, the
heartbroken convict retracts his desperate
words. Charles’ empathy has made him want
to display a similar tenderness to his child
and be present, even if behind prison bars.
Through openness, emotions are reconciled
and controlled, self-destructiveness is re-
placed by self-actualization, and compassion
arises naturally, allowing one person to help
another after having helped himself.
The Work closes with a title card stating
that not a single man who has taken part in
the program has been reincarcerated after
his release. Rick’s seemingly blind trust in
the process finds itself fully justified in these
statistics. The daring approach of McLeary
and Aldous’ filmmaking, completely im-
mersive without trying to be invisible or to
influence the chain of events, is also proven
to have been a risk worth taking. “I’m alive
and I’m fucking grateful,” says Rick as the
last day ends. Just as the pain displayed by
the participants throughout the film unset-
tled the men surrounding them, the grati-
tude that they experience by the end of the
therapy also has the potential to galvanize
the spectator, who may be inclined to try and
spread that feeling of generosity and thank-
fulness. In other words, the work never ends.
75
 High Fantasy
Jenna Bass | South Africa

BY SIMRAN HANS

Less than six minutes into High Fantasy,
four teenagers on a road trip to a farm on
South Africa’s Northern Cape—where they
intend to camp under the stars and poten-
tially smoke some half-decent marijua-
na—are sharing their emotional responses
to the surrounding scenery, direct to cam-
era. Training her cell phone camera on the
car’s other passengers, the provocative
Xoli (Qondiswa James) asks how “the land”
makes each person “feel”—a neat, bitchy way
to draw attention to the fact that their white
friend Lexi’s (Francesca Varrie Michel) fam-
ily “stole” their farm from its indigenous
owners. Apparently oblivious to Xoli’s in-
sinuation, Lexi says the land makes her feel
“trapped;” for sensitive biracial peacekeeper
Tatiana (Liza Scholtz), it’s “tainted…because
it was ripped from other people.” Lexi glanc-
es awkwardly at the camera recording the
conversation. Xoli shoves it further in her
face, anticipating a reaction shot; the white
girl can’t disagree.
If the combination of the chosen medi-
um and self-consciously woo-woo dialogue
seems to indicate that this will be A Film
About Millennials, it’s both a red flag and a
red herring. While director Jenna Bass aims
to take her characters and their feels serious-
ly, she has also contrived to place them with-
in a high-concept container that throws both
into sharp relief. Styled as a found-footage
documentary—interspersing iPhone footage
from the characters’ varying perspectives
(the director and actors share a cinematogra-
phy credit) with reality TV-style interviews
filmed after the fact, and with the young cast
improvising much of their dialogue—High
Fantasy brings a modern and forthright-

76
ly political sheen to a venerable genre: the
body-swap comedy. Squashed into a tent to-
gether for the night, the quartet—Xoli, Lexi,
Tatiana, and their appointed male chaper-
one, the playful, swaggering Thami (Nala
Khumalo), whose immaturity is signposted
by his insistence on sleeping on a giant, in-
flatable slice of pizza—go to sleep and, in-
explicably, wakes up the next morning in
one another’s skins. Thami becomes Xoli,
Tatiana becomes Thami, Lexi is Tatiana, and
Xoli, to her shuddering disgust, swaps bodies
with Lexi.
As a means of exploring identity politics—
particularly within the uniquely charged
context of contemporary South Africa—this
Freaky Friday-style conceit is neither as trite
nor as didactic as it may sound on paper;
rather, it neatly literalizes the idea of “lived
experience.” As Americanized as Bass’ teen-
age protagonists are, all of them are various-
ly alicted with the hangover of apartheid. “I
used to sing the national anthem with pride,
but now I don’t fuck with it,” says Thami-as-
Thami, calling bullshit on Desmond Tutu’s
“Rainbow Nation” and South Africa’s per-
formance of political progress following
the African National Congress’ electoral
win in 1994. Elsewhere, after the body swap
has been reversed (about which more be-
low), Xoli is enraged by the suggestion that
the police should be called in to help locate
the missing Lexi: “You want me to go to the
police and put my body on the line for some
fucking white girl?” she shouts, invoking her
brushes with the cops during the country’s
student protests in 2015 and 2016.
In vividly drawn scenes such as Xoli-as-
Lexi tearing frantically at her newly white
skin or Tatiana-as-Thami declaring that
she is “traumatized” to suddenly possess a
penis, Bass’ inventive critique cuts across
the intersections of identity to expose the
boundaries of empathy, suggesting that
even “progressive” people perhaps aren’t
as open-minded as they make themselves
out to be. Bass is interested in the relation-
ship between bodies and semantics, in what
happens when a young man who brags about
“smashing a bitch” then has to inhabit the
body of one. “The hardest part for me,” says
unabashed womanizer Thami in his post-in-
cident, to-camera interview as he reflects on
his time in Xoli’s body, “is to understand why
I was so upset that I turned into a woman”; in
an earlier portion of the interview, he insists
that “all men are trash,” including himself.
If all this makes the film sound like an in-
elegant academic thought experiment, to a
certain extent it is—but Bass is a smart and
capable enough filmmaker to keep the action
raucous and comic even as she humours (or
faithfully reflects) the self-examining, emo-
tionally literate way that Generation Y (or,
if we’re feeling cynical, Generation Woke)
talks about diversity and tolerance. It’s only
once the characters step back into their own
shoes that the film begins to lose its footing.
When a dip in an outdoor pool miraculous-
ly transports everyone back into their own
bodies, Lexi insists that she’s “not Lexi” and
wanders of into the desert—an inexplicable
plot twist built to facilitate a moment of reve-
lation in her post-incident interview. (A brief
love scene between Lexi and Thami, once the
pair have reverted back to their own bodies,
feels similarly out of sync with the rest of the
film.) We never learn why Lexi disappears, or
where to; rather, Bass seems to have worked
backwards from the political statements she
wants to make about the dynamics of white-
ness and privilege and engineered her nar-
rative to match, regardless of how much it
defies its own logic.
In the film’s final interview-style coda,
Lexi admits that now, having lived for just
a few hours as the oppressed and not the
oppressor, she wishes she weren’t white.
“I was born in this body and I can’t escape
it. Am I angry about what it is? Yes. There,”
she admits, suggesting that the experience
has changed, or at the very least challenged
her. “You’re white. How does it feel to be
white? Would you chose to be white?” she
asks her interviewer—a rhetorical move that
allows Bass, who herself is a white woman,
to implicitly skewer her own privilege. The
blunt delivery of these political messages
is both the film’s greatest strength and big-
gest weakness: however thoughtful, witty
or well-meaning, such insistence ends up
feeling a little shrill. This brassiness also
doesn’t distract from the fact that in Bass’
self-described “satire,” it’s not immediate-
ly evident whom or what is being satirized;
it’s certainly not the teenage protagonists,
who the film reveres (and indulges) too
much to truly criticize. The sharp point
of Bass’s self-declared satirical jab lacks
a target.
Nevertheless, the self-conscious slight-
ness of the project—the whole thing clocks
in at just 74 minutes—allows Bass to sidestep
the need to more fully flesh out her concepts.
Its leanness helpfully situates the film with-
in an experimental, DIY space that allows
her to be more anarchic—and certainly more
confrontational—with her politics, which
in its way is exciting to watch. It will be in-
teresting to see if this rabble-rousing spirit
travels with Bass to her next project, and to
imagine which muscles she might flex with
a less restrictive budget. Here’s hoping that
she doesn’t pull any punches.
A Fantastic Woman
Sebastián Lelio | Chile
Premiered at Berlin a few months before
BY ANGELO MUREDDA its creator Sebastián Lelio’s first foray
into English-language filmmaking with
the Rachel Weisz-starring Disobedience, A
Fantastic Woman sees the Chilean writer-di-
rector taking another angle on the tale he
told in his 2013 breakthrough Gloria: that
of a down-on-her-luck woman restrained by
social mores that ultimately prove too small
to contain her. Where, true to its title, Gloria
resolved itself into a Laura Branigan-styled
power ballad about the sexual potency and
resiliency of its eponymous fiftysomething
heroine (Paulina García, who will be re-
placed by Julianne Moore in Lelio’s forth-
coming remake), in A Fantastic Woman Lelio
raises the dramatic stakes without substan-
tially deepening his text, ofering an under-
cooked character study that doubles as an
LGBTQ rif on Sophocles’ Antigone, loosely
revolving around its heroine’s thesis that
“saying goodbye to a loved one when he dies
78
is a basic human right.” Despite the classical
referent and a diverse stylistic palette that
ranges from realist tracking shots to impres-
sionistic mood lighting, the film never quite
elevates its subject the way it clearly intends
to, flattening pressing real-world issues into
tired bromides. Worse, it reduces its own os-
tensibly fantastic heroine to a stereotypical
vision of a trans woman’s sufering as beau-
tiful and noble—making the film into the
kind of sympathetic outsider story that only
a well-meaning outsider to a particular com-
munity could tell.
When we first meet our heroine, sing-
er-hostess Marina (Daniela Vega), she is
in the process of moving in with her much
older, upper-middle-class partner Orlando
(Francisco Reyes), with whom she shares all
the trappings of domestic bliss, including an
old dog, an apartment with a nice view, and
tentative plans for a romantic getaway to
Argentina. That promising if precarious bub-
ble is burst in an instant when Orlando suf- ballad in the final moments—but who doesn’t agnosis. A generous reading of the film’s sig-
fers an aneurysm in the middle of the night, get to develop an actual character so much nature tableaux—where Marina finds herself
following a birthday dinner for Marina. as several disconnected sides of one. In in- lost in reverie before her wobbly reflection as
When he dies at the hospital, it falls to terviews, Lelio has put a positive spin on the two movers carry a giant pane of glass on the
Marina to make the necessary arrangements film’s heterogeneity in regards to character street—might be that we are seeing a lyrical
inasmuch as anyone will let her, her status as and style, gesturing to its varied aesthetic portrait in miniature of a woman atomized
a trans woman immediately discounting her touchstones, from film noir to Fassbinder. by grief, anxiously reassembling herself as a
in the eyes of the assorted gatekeepers she While there’s a pervasive flatness that dogs single woman now that all of her future plans
encounters. As the last person to see Orlando the visual execution of each of these stylis- for two have been dashed. All the same, it’s
alive, she soon finds herself misgendered, tic digressions (like a strangely unmagical hard to shake the feeling that Lelio is simply
displaced, and doubted as his partner, legal magical-realist interlude of Marina bracing allowing himself to be seduced by easy visual
executor, and mourner by everyone from herself against a stif existential wind), it’s metaphors, just as he allows Vega’s stoic face
hospital oicials to police to Orlando’s dis- the film’s heavy-handed thematizing about to serve as a figurative shortcut for themes of
tant family members. Marina that most lets Vega down; and at fluidity and constancy.
There are the bones of a good, politically times, it dangerously edges toward using the For all the mirrors he lovingly positions
fraught melodrama in this story of how even performer’s own gender identity as a trans Vega against and all the admiring close-ups
the squarest, most outwardly heteronorma- woman as shorthand for her unformed char- that bring her right up to the edge of the lens
tive coupling—Marina and Orlando’s love life acter’s ostensible fluidity. for a time-stopping beauty shot, Lelio can’t
is glimpsed in the overture via a series of ten- It’s not for any lack of good intentions that seem to realize Marina except as a series of
der meals, slow dances, and tasteful make- A Fantastic Woman falls short in the char- types. She’s variously a woman in trouble,
outs in front of studio windows—can become acterization of its eponymous subject, the a woman aggrieved, a woman avenged, and
an occasion for virulently transphobic bigots very place where a one-woman tour de force (most revealing of the film’s limited perspec-
to exercise their privilege and authority in like this really ought to succeed. One would tive) a trans woman in flux. Those varying
determining what is or is not authentic, and be hard-pressed, for instance, to argue that roles might make for a plum portfolio-build-
who is or is not family. Yet Lelio can’t seem the film does not side squarely with Marina er for an actress at the start of a promising
to settle on a tone that would make good on when Orlando’s ex-wife cruelly snaps that career in the same way that Lelio’s flirta-
this incendiary premise, dithering between she doesn’t know what she’s looking at when tions with camp, melodrama, and noir might
indignation and bemusement at the pa- she sees Marina’s face, and then brands her serve as calling cards for his transition into
rade of grotesques with whom Marina has as a chimera—but Lelio’s insistence on fram- higher-budgeted English-language films.
to contend. Nor does he seem to have much ing his actress within an endless array of But in the end, they don’t add up to much
interest in advancing an argument on trans mirrors is not much more progressive, let of a coherent character profile, or much of
rights that runs deeper than generic senti- alone more interesting, than his villain’s di- a movie.
ments about the universality of love and the
small-mindedness of those who would regu-
late it. Despite the repeated motif of Marina
strutting confidently toward the camera in
graceful tracking shots, as well as a cathar-
tic late sequence where, in a direct rhyme of
Gloria’s equally vengeful you-go-girl denoue-
ment, she aggressively mounts a car filled
with Orlando’s most hostile family mem-
bers—finally shedding her deferential tone
and channelling her energy and rage into the
role of the monster they’ve long waited for
her to play—Marina’s righteous anger feels
inorganic, phoned in for sympathetic cis au-
diences to marvel at and cheer for.
The result is a curiously noncommittal
bit of social-justice fanfare that does little to
faithfully serve either its heroine or its lead
actress, who ably handles all the dramatic
tests the script throws at her—from tetchy
exchanges with faux-concerned police of-
ficers to the performance of an elegiac love

79
Exploded View | By Chuck Stephens
Bruce Conner’s
Crossroads
How many names can you call Bruce Conner?
Surrealist, beat, prankster, poet, illustrator,
assemblagist, filmmaker, punk. Spray-paint
anything you like across Conner’s legacy
and someone will think it sticks. A few years
ago, a big brain from Harvard hilariously
decreed this slipperiest of major American
filmmakers a “structuralist” (never mind
the centrality of “content” in, or the pro-
foundly expressive and emotive strains
running throughout, the artist’s work); else-
where in the pages of this very magazine
you’ll find musings on the “fascist aesthet-
ic” in Conner’s A Movie. Myriad, sometimes
mirthful, but often wholly misguided, such
assessments litter the Google-field of old
newspaper articles on the artist from New
York to Los Angeles. Conner (1933-2008)
reveled in the tipsy tumult of his ever-elusive
“reputation,” sometimes billing his work as a
“Dennis Hopper one-man show,” sometimes
showing up at gallery functions claiming to
be a hired hand merely impersonating the
artist Bruce Conner. “When I did my show
2000 BC,” he told legendary underground
publisher V. Vale in a 2005 interview now
collected in the recently published Bruce
Conner: The Afternoon Interviews (RE/
Search Publications), “I saved all kinds of
comments and reviews. On the same day,
there would be a newspaper review saying
I was an egomaniac and Jesus Christ, and
in the same city another newspaper article
would say that I’m a humble person and gen-
erous and self-efacing…You could fill up the
United Nations with diferent points of view
about what Bruce Conner’s work is: what it
means, what he’s doing, what it is…”
Bruce Conner made movies about movies
(A Movie), movies about movie stars (Marilyn
Times Five, 1973), ecstatic movies about
dancing and freedom (Breakaway, 1966),
furious movies about fallen heroes (Report,
1967), and visionary movies about blindness,
music, and joy (Cosmic Ray, 1962). Most of all,
though, Conner made movies about death.
Not for nothing do the words “The End” re-
peatedly fill the screen throughout A Movie,
where jalopies plummet from clifs, dare-
devils tiptoe across oblivion, and jouissance
is a submarine captain’s response to a stag-
film hottie: pushing the “Fire” plunger on a
nuclear-tipped torpedo. If “found footage”
was the cornerstone of Conner’s filmic en-
deavour, his greatest find may well have been
the footage he obtained from the US govern-
ment through the Freedom of Information
Act: images of the underwater detonation of
an A-bomb at the Bikini Atoll in 1946, filmed
by some 700 cameras running at various
ultra-high speeds and positioned at vantag-
es from heaven to earth. From these, Conner
chose the 23 shots that comprise his 37-
minute mushroom-cloud minuet Crossroads
(1976), a mortifyingly glorious pas de deux
for celestial creation and terrestrial oblitera-
tion. Though only one of several masterpiec-
es Conner created, Crossroads is, today more
than ever, a major touchstone for Conner’s
legacy-guardians, and UCLA Senior Film
Preservationist Ross Lipman’s practical and
theoretical account (for Artforum, availa-
ble online) of the film’s latest restoration in
2013 is a must-read for any modern cinephile
clambering across the film/digital chasm.
As I write these words, the Bulletin of
Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock—osten-
sible indicator of our political proximity to
nuclear oblivion—sits at two minutes before
midnight. We can feel it all around us, this
closing-in. Far too many of our present mo-
ments have come to seem as if it’s all over but
for the end credits. Sitting at the crossroads,
both devil and naïf, Bruce Conner—prank-
meister, punk polemicist, beatrealist, surrlit-
eralist—laughed and saw it all a diferent way:
destruction as creation. (So, unsurprisingly,
did Japanese filmmakers from Ichikawa Kon
to Fukasaku Kinji, all-too-proximal children
of the atom bomb.) In Conner’s Crossroads,
that nuclear spark was also the arcing of a
projector lamp, that detonation another in-
nately cinematic sudden lurch from idea into
action, stillness into animation, fire into wa-
ter into air, the crossroads of fading life and
blinding light. Showtime!
 Destination partner

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